Hobnobbing with My Favorite Living Novelist
To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor-close to being in love. Trees flower into brilliant clouds that drape across the parks, plumes of smoke and steam rise into the blue or curl away on the wind, and disparate actions each the object of intense concentration run together in a fume of color, motion and sound, with the charm of a first dance or a first kiss. Isn't that wonderful? Don't you smell it and taste it feel it in your bones? I do. Mark Helprin paints pictures infused with love and an up;-close and personal attachment to the fiber of the city. He's in love with Manhattan, from the Staten Island Ferry all the way to Central Park. He knows what it looks like as you approach from Long Island, driving past the early commuter trains with sleeping passengers leaning against the windows rumbl(ing) west to a city sleeping in gray. I've been that sleeping passenger, nestled next to my father. I'd felt the same frisson of en...