PARIS IN THE PRESENT TENSE

By Mark Helprin

394 pp. The Overlook Press. $28.95.

With a sure sense that drama is contrast, Mark Helprin’s new novel about Paris begins in that city’s mighty opposite, New York. And not in the light that is Paris’s hallmark but in the darkness above Manhattan as Air France 017, heading eastward, splits “a path through the night, rising and falling more smoothly than a boat on a gently rolling sea.”

This is only the first of the innumerable contrasts wrapped helix-like around the story of Jules Lacour, a septuagenarian cellist of extraordinary sensitivity and gloominess (he is French, after all). There is the contrast of the evanescence of music — “born into the air only instantly to die” — and the absoluteness of silence. There is the contrast of men and women (he is French, after all), of coarse America and subtle Europe, of Jew and gentile, of the Nazi past in which his parents perished and the ominous present in which his grandson, Luc, lies dying of leukemia. And finally there is the contrast of youth and age, for although Jules falls in love instantly and often — in Raymond Chandler’s words, he’s about as hard to get as a haircut — he falls most hopelessly for his beautiful young student Élodi, who is entering life just as he is increasingly aware of his own evanescence. In other words, “Paris in the Present Tense” is a novel about love, and therefore about loss.

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If these are clichés — what’s more threadbare than May and December, student and amorous teacher? — Helprin revitalizes them with the energy of his language. A rhetorician might slice his prose style into scraps of Greek — asyndeton here, hypotaxis there — but that would fail to account for the intensely lyrical voice that both heightens and deepens every sentence, at times attaining a kind of Joycean beauty: “The compassionate dead looking on were infinitely wiser than the living, so many of whom never stopped for an instant as they thrashed through life like fish in a net.”