Freddy and Fredericka - Hardcover

Helprin, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594200548 ISBN 13: 9781594200540

Publisher: Penguin Press, 2005

Synopsis

Ridiculed as a matter of course by the British press for their routine gaffes, Prince of Wales Freddy and his wife, the frivolous Fredericka, are sent on a quest to colonize the barbaric land of America, an endeavor during which they engage in such misadventures as a freight train ride, an art theft, and a wayward presidential election. 125,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, Mark Helprin served in the Israeli Army, Israeli Air Force, and British Merchant Navy. He is the author of A Dove of the East and Other Stories, Refiner's Fire, Ellis Island and Other Stories, Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case, and The Pacific and Other Stories.

Reviews

Readers will recognize Prince Charles and Princess Diana in this farcical fairy tale about the contemporary ills of right-wing America and the British monarchy—and fans of Princess Diana will not be amused. Frederick and Fredericka is an imaginative story about politics and society that feels loose, undisciplined, and self-indulgent. (But hey, stop the presses—Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times liked a book!) Although the story moves along quickly, it nonetheless takes too long to reach its obvious, inevitable, and naïve conclusion. Some readers will enjoy the slapstick humor. Others will find many of the gags tired and overblown, and the tone, which varies from farcical to sentimental, irritating. But if you’re up for a royal misadventure, you’ll enjoy the good, lighthearted fun.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

A thinly veiled satire of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, pre-divorce-his serious mien and protruding ears, her horsey sex appeal-turns into a comic adventure when the eponymous royal couple are sent on a secret mission to conquer the United States, where they plunge in and out of such ludicrous scrapes as knocking out each other's front teeth and surviving a raging wildfire. The narrative often feels burdened by its subplots, including a nefarious attempt by press barons to dethrone the royal couple, and Helprin has a distracting tendency to throw in gossipy asides about real personages, such as Bill Gates. But the sentimental pieties familiar from Helprin's previous work-his strapping, athletic hero and heroine rhapsodize about the values of hard work and finding oneself-are here made more palatable by the absurd context. Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" perhaps wields too overt an influence, but at its best the novel achieves genuine lightness.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

The cover of Mark Helprin's massive Freddy and Fredericka calls it "a novel." Like nearly everything else about Helprin's latest offering, this turns out to be facetious.

In his best works -- Refiner's Fire (1977), A Soldier of the Great War (1991) and, probably most of all, Winter's Tale (1983) -- Helprin has defied categorization and woven visions from equal parts of fantasy and realism. These books best define the wide range of Helprin's universe. Refiner's Fire and A Soldier of the Great War drew, in part, from his experiences in the military (particularly stints in the Israeli army and air force), and his much-loved Winter's Tale is Herbert Asbury's ferocious The Gangs of New York brilliantly reconceived as a rough fairy tale. But in Freddy and Fredericka, Helprin's instincts have jumped the track, and he has given in to whimsy.

The title characters are the prince of Wales and his wife, reduced by the modern age to tabloid fodder for the British press. A secret society devoted to restoring the monarchy to power sends them on a mission to reconquer America; they are dropped by parachute into New Jersey as a prelude to getting involved in the presidential race. . . . Stop me if you've heard this one before.

At first glance, Freddy and Fredericka seems to be a satire of the British royal family, but nothing in it is as ludicrous as the antics of the real royals. The second half of the book appears to be a send-up of American politics, but it is broad and toothless -- surprisingly so for a writer as well known for his stinging editorials in the Wall Street Journal as for his fiction.

Several characters are given cartoon names that identify their function in the plot -- the prince serves a sexual apprenticeship to Lady Phoebe Boylingehotte, the leader of the Labour Party is Mr. Apehand -- and numerous others, such as Doctor Popcorn, Canal Diggeridoo and Lord Piggleswade, have names that might yield some hidden meaning to a reader more astute than I. Helprin strains for a manic effect halfway between Monty Python and Voltaire, the Marx Brothers and Swift, but the punch lines to several long dialogues are heavy, web-footed clunkers that are bafflingly unwitty. "Have you ever read an Italian newspaper?" someone asks. "I imagine it's like being on drugs." And, "I sometimes get presidents and famous accountants mixed up." And, "A man never rises to greater heights than when he does not know where he is going." The point of these and many other jokes is as elusive as a French symbolist poem; one wishes an editor, a friend, somebody, had been there during the writing of this book to ask Helprin exactly what he meant.

Lines that can be understood are apparently intended to let us know that the book's author is educated:

" 'There are a lot of discos in Prague. I've been to them. I may have danced with Kafka.'

" 'Probably not: he was a bit of a bug.' "

And, " 'I'm working' "

" 'On what?' "

" 'Gibbon.' "

" 'The monkey?' "

And, "Their mouths struck as if in a Dantean travesty of a kiss. . . ."

It's a toss-up as to who will find these jokes less funny, those who get them or those who don't.

As if to remind us that he can be a superb prose stylist, Helprin pours out sentences such as, "Three marginicidal kings have perished there. It is beyond the dissilient cliffs of pure water that cleave the great ocean and fall through infinite tunnels of mist. It is where the vast stinking body of the expired Dragon of Penrith was laid to rest, only to vapourise and disappear immediately upon contact with the white-hot ground. Oh, devils! Oh, God forsaken! Oh, darkness, stench, and flame!"

Clearly, the passage is meant to sound comically overwrought, but even on that level it is, like much of the book, overwritten. In contrast, Freddy and Fredericka stops cold, and the writing goes flat and earnest when the author seems to step in and tell us what the book is really about. "There was no way properly," reads one such passage near the end, "to credit or acknowledge the scores of millions who had fought in the name of the king. . . . Only God could so acknowledge, and, as for the king, this was the unbearable burden that would press him down for the rest of his days." If I'm not mistaken, the author is displaying an affection for the traditions of the British monarchy that would make T.S. Eliot blush.

Helprin is fond of telling interviewers that he is a traditionalist who doesn't read modern fiction, but Freddy and Fredericka is padded with enough tedious wordplay and exhausted literary conceits to fill several volumes by the authors Helprin says he doesn't read. The book never congeals as a fable, satire, farce or anything except a royal self-indulgence.

Reviewed by Allen Barra
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Though it is hard to be a king, it is harder yet to become one," begins this wildly imaginative, adventure-filled, clever—and also overlong and self-indulgent—parody of a future king and queen of England, who are dead ringers for Charles and Diana. Freddy lacks the charisma and royal presence that would qualify him for kingship (in spite of his intelligence and book smarts), so he and his gorgeous but dumb wife, Fredericka, are packed off to a savage land—America—where Freddy must fulfill a mysterious quest in order to achieve his destiny. Helprin (The Pacific and Other Stories, etc.) plays out his zany plot on a grand scale, attempting a satiric critique of modern English and American society. The narrative is loaded with witty philosophical asides about the folly of human nature and of the governments people elect or endure. When the dorky prince and his ditsy wife arrive incognito in America, parachuting naked into New Jersey, they embark on a series of screwball adventures that take them from coast to coast. Most momentously, Freddy finds himself a secret adviser to an egregiously stupid presidential candidate. Rarely does the narrative shimmer with the lyricism that distinguishes Helprin's best work, but readers can have fun with this book, which is probably all Helprin intended.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Helprin generates a delectable tension between his impeccable style and unbridled imagination in tales that careen from precise realism to exalted romantic fantasy. His first novel in a decade, following the sumptuous The Pacific and Other Stories [BKL O 1 04], is a satirical, picaresque romp that makes shrewd, gleeful fun of the British monarchy and the American presidential campaign. Freddy, the Prince of Wales, is an outdoorsy, erudite, large-eared, and well-meaning man, but he is also hapless, falling repeatedly into ludicrous situations that delight the rapacious press and give fits to his mother the queen and his eccentric father. And Fredericka, Freddy's blond, buxom, camera-loving, seemingly vapid wife, doesn't help. Finally, after a series of vaudevillian mishaps, Freddy and Fredericka are sent incognito to America to redeem themselves. Their mission impossible? Reconquer the colony. After parachuting into the industrial wasteland of New Jersey and stealing a motorcycle from a Hell's Angel, the two intrepid royals, a bit worse for wear, head west, riding freight trains, posing as dentists, and serving as forest fire lookouts until Freddy very nearly secures a cabinet position. Replete with slapstick and hilarious linguistic misunderstandings, this intermittently verbose yet irresistibly mischievous fable draws freely on Don Quixote, Mark Twain, Monty Python, and Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, yet is in the end pure Helprin in its narrative agility and celebration of nature's glory and human kindness, courage, and love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1594200548
• ISBN 13: 9781594200540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576