Winter's Tale

Rereads are always risky. Unfortunately this one went worse than anticipated. If you retain nostalgia for this title, click away from this review now. 
From when I originally read this as a teen, I remembered only a love story, when I picked it back up, I was hoping for magic and a connection to the past. My past as much as that of historical New York. Perhaps it was too high a bar to set.  Turns out the love story is much less of the framework than I recalled, unless you count the love Helprin has for winter and New York. 
No idea how much the ‘historical' New York depicted is fantasy or exaggeration, it was from time to time, the most enchanting part to read about. Immersive descriptions, the colours and lights of winter, the reader feels the season, even when reading it in late spring.
And that's about it for the positives. 
Sadly, passion for a city on this level seems a step away from the rabid passion for a nation these days labelled as nationalism/patriotism, which  feels more pejorative than virtue at this point, especially linked to an American context.
Political and economic philosophy espoused not quite my vibe: strong push for meritocracy. The plight of ‘the poor/the city of the poor' is returned to regularly, but always at a distance, feels more like a grotesque prop of disease, corruption and stupidity, not humanized by the inclusion of any one character that represents the group for more than a couple pages, usually unnamed and pitiable, soon to be destroyed, unless they do a bootstrap-style ‘getting out'. Justice as a golden abstract gets a lot of mentions but not any of the social structures or revamps which might assist ‘the poor'; I believe there was one specific negative reference to welfare. 
Reminded of Ayn Rand, not so much in the specifics, but in the general sweeping monologues that land somewhere between poetic and impenetrable, a thinly veiled platform for the author to hold forth on his views.
Also pretty heavy on that classic (ableist) fairy tale divide (to be pure and virtuous is to be beautiful, to be evil or pitiable is to be ugly).
Finding out the author is billed as a ‘conservative commentator' was not surprising. 
Seems to waffle between emphasizing the changing winds of fortune, just how quickly luck can arrive or abandon, how much more beautiful things are when their brevity and vulnerability is understood, and vaguely promising that the virtuous will eventually be rewarded. 
Dangerous to tell oneself a fairytale that ‘everything happens for a reason', that it's all part of a larger picture on a greater timescale than we can perceive, because, much like religion, it promises justice later/in the next life and not now. 
Or of course, to get justice now, you could blame the poor for the destruction of the city, burn the whole thing to the ground, costing who knows how many lives, and end as if this is just the price for a fresh start, which feels a Iittle too close to genocide for my taste.
A cast of interesting characters, decently interwoven, but a few too many with not enough time on the page to feel invested.
I found the pacing frustrating. Major plot points described in a line, scenic interstitials described in detail; irresistible cliffhanger, then hundreds of pages spent introducing other characters. Various goings on hinted at and never resolved. Spent most of the book in a state of impatience, not immersed in the plot but waiting for it to return, only briefly carried off by a beautiful or absurd  description. 
Author has a fondness for turning unorthodox lists into meandering paragraphs, and describing many things in terms of snakes. A bit too in love with finding ‘ten dollar words' or archaic words to  plump up a paragraph. 
⚠️ Touches briefly on a whole bunch of the truly awful parts of being a child in (the industrial revolution (?)) or really any time before modern protections were put in place  (yes, I recognize the limits of those protections; we'll call it room for improvement). 
Little too casual with the word ‘rape' as a descriptor in less violent settings.
That whole scene with the waitress feels a lot like romaticizing sexual harrassment, with inebriation as a cover.  😬
Sex between/sexualization of minors, passing reference to sexual relationship between clergyman and underage boys, child labour, ableism, fatphobia, animal cruelty, whiff of homophobia, SA