What is the author's style in A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin?

Language in this story ranges from the profane, such as the disgusting description of an outdoor toilet for Italian soldiers who formed "two lines of grimacing, twisting, groaning creatures with shaved heads and bad teeth who struggled not to fall into the horrible soup they strained to augment..one involved in a vendetta could easily and anonymously be flipped backward, like the Neapolitans" (The 19th River Brigade, p. 260) to the sublime as Alessandro reminisces about the joys of his life - love, art, food, music: "His heart rose in remembrance of the childish enthusiasms he'd had as a small boy—the songs he was not afraid to sing in the presence of adults he hardly knew, the way he had skipped and danced on the street un-self-consciously, for these brought him to his own child" (La Rondine, p. 857). There is, however, a match between descriptions of obscene physicality and lyrical passages filled with spirit to satisfy the classical requirement for balance in works of art.