With Refiner's Fire, Mark Helprin … risks more than most novelists dare in 10 years. Helprin writes like a saint, plots like a demon, and has an imagination that would be felonious in all but the larger democracies. That Refiner's Fire is his first novel (though second book) humbles me, and that Marshall Pearl, his Odysseyan protagonist, went to Harvard and yet still emerges as a likable soldier of fortune stuns me. Ivy Leaguers are supposed to be no longer eligible for veneration. (p. 72)

But, back to the beginning, for Helprin's nature is starkly exemplified in his first book, A Dove Of The East (1976). Here, in a collection of generally competent short stories … Helprin practiced sketches of his heroic temperament. There are no antiheroes in Dove, of course, but there are young men torn between the fantastic and the desperate…. [There] is, in the title story, a mythical Jewish cowboy...