At the risk of giving away the conclusion, I was disappointed with this book. Helprin is an author I admire greatly, he can form a sentence like few others and his skill at allegory and parable are second to none, but this one left me feeling unsatisfied.
This is the story of an old man, a 70-something French Jew, a survivor of the Holocaust as a child, who has devoted his life to art, specifically composing music. He has many regrets, not the least of which is that by pursuing his artistic dreams he has sacrificed any sort of financial well-being -- a thing that would be useful now that his grandchild has been given a cancer diagnosis. What follows is a string of deeply implausible incidents, including a 70-something man defeating three armed and violent young men in a street fight, killing two of them with his bare hands.
In the course of trying to set things right at the end our hero encounters lots of cliches. Eccentric egomaniacal corporate leaders and their stooges, pusillanimous and conniving intellectuals, ethnically appropriate buddy cops, a bullied and hapless loser, and assorted others of two-dimensions.
As a picture of old age, it only partially succeeds. To our aging hero, the underlying terror of old age is the world moving away from him. Technological advances coarsen the world (in his view), his job in academia is withering on the vine as he is slowly being phased out, worst of all the anti-semitism that so informed his childhood is resurging.
While all these things are true, they are superficial (except of course the anti-semitism). The real terror of aging is the irreversible decay of you body and skills and underlying fear of dementia or otherwise becoming totally dependent. No such fears affect our fit-as-a-30-year-old aging hero.
While our hero is nicely drawn and coherent. His need to fix things, to make things right, in view of what he sees as the costly decisions he may have made early in life is sharp and believable. The fact that his feelings and behavior toward women didn't change over the course of his life -- the child being father of the man -- also rings true. But it's not enough to overcome the dominant sense of implausibility.
Should you read Paris in the Present Tense? Nah. You could do worse, but you could also do better, including most of Helprin's other writings.
