Appreciating life’s moments of perfection

The Pacific

And Other Stories

Mark Helprin

Penguin Press: 368 pp., $25.95

*

Long before J.K. Rowling or Susanna Clarke wrote their big books of magic, readers were being awed by Mark Helprin’s unique brand of enchantment and exotic atmospheres. He established his reputation in the early 1980s and 1990s with “Winter’s Tale” and “A Soldier of the Great War,” huge novels of vibrant decor and imagination.

“The Pacific and Other Stories” is a worthy descendant of these, for there is plenty of magic here, though it isn’t produced from the tip of a wand. Helprin’s magic is earthly, human. The stories range over many weighty subjects -- war, the effect of Sept. 11, baseball, opera, even the life of Herman Melville -- but always the focus is the same: on attaining holiness and practicing charity in an age obsessed with science and reason.

In “Monday,” we meet Fitch, a tough New York City contractor who seems of another time -- an aging bachelor, more suited to reading the Roman thinkers than Page Six of the New York Post. When a young widow asks him to remodel her apartment, he displays a special eloquence: “The dust on the windows is from the Trade Center,” he tells her. “It will have to be washed down very carefully, or the mineral grit will scratch and fog the glass. And it will have to be done respectfully, because the clouds of dust that floated against these windows were more than merely inanimate.”

Fitch learns that this young woman, Lilly, is a widow because her husband was in one of the towers, and he risks bankruptcy to give her a remodeling job she could never afford. It is a fairy tale, ending with Lilly speechless and Fitch realizing that his gesture, like the Catholic Mass of his childhood, has served to “keep, encourage, and sustain a sense of holiness, and to hold open the channels to grace.”

In story after story, Helprin presents us with people confronting life’s ugliness with small acts of perfection. An injured World War II British paratrooper in “A Brilliant Idea and His Own” radios German troop movements despite his agonizing pain and the knowledge that he may die on the rooftop where he lies.

In the title story, a woman awaits her husband’s return from the war by working as a welder in an aircraft factory. She believes her fierce devotion to her job is somehow tied to bringing him home safely: “[T]he timing of her welds, the blinking of the arc ... made a kind of quiet thunder that rolled through all things.” Helprin lets us feel her optimism, until he breaks our hearts in the last sentence.

The exquisite “Perfection” comes closest to resembling a magic fable of the sort that Rowling or Clarke might write. It’s 1957, and Roger Reveshze, a young Hasidic Jew in a closed religious community in Brooklyn, hears a sportscaster on the radio announce that the “House of Ruth” is in trouble. Roger decides he must help the slumping “Yenkiss.” Mickey “Mental” and his crew are stunned as this boy, who talks his way into batting practice, hits balls out of the stadium, thanks to an invisible angelic helper: (“It was then that he felt the arms, fluttering and feathered, golden and shiny, reach from behind him and ... take hold of his hands on the bat.”)

There’s plenty of comedy -- Yogi Berra describes for the press, in his bizarre way, the influx of Hebrew prayers and kosher food and the rabbis installed behind home plate -- but all is underscored by a tragic sense of cosmic balance. Roger’s parents died in the Holocaust, he tells the team, and his excellence at baseball is some mysterious form of compensation: “[A]ll I want from the world is some indication or sign that ... there is a justice and a beauty that will leap back to lift the ones I love from the kind of grave they were given.” This is all the motivation the Yankees need, and Roger leaves as quickly as he had arrived.

Perfection exists in our world, Helprin suggests in this splendid collection, but it takes a quick eye to spot the momentary gleams. And for those who might not be quick enough, his writing preserves them, in a prose that is as glassy and smooth as amber.