Music asked nothing, required nothing, needed nothing, betrayed nothing. It appeared instantly when called, even in memory. It was made of the ineffable magic in the empty spaces between – and the relation of – its otherwise unremarkable components.

“Wow,” I thought. “There’s a Mark Helprin novel I haven’t read yet.” A bargain deal had appeared, and I checked on Amazon and found I hadn’t bought it. So I did. Only then did I discover that I’d read Paris In the Present Tense before. I must have gotten a free review copy or something. However, I was only briefly discomfited by this. A Helprin novel always bears – and rewards – re-reading.

Jules Lacour is a septuagenarian Jewish music instructor in Paris. He is neither rich nor famous, though he is one of the geniuses of his generation – because this generation cares nothing for genius. But Jules has lived content with his art, except for missing his late wife.

But now his grandson has leukemia, and Jules wishes he had money to get him treatment. An offer from an American insurance conglomerate, to write them a signature tune, gives him brief hope, which they then dash callously.

So when Jules discovers that he has a previously undiagnosed brain aneurism that could kill him at any moment, he concocts a plan to make the company pay, and thereby to give his grandson a chance at life.

My big problem with Paris In the Present Time, you’ve probably guessed, is that our hero is an unapologetic fraudster. I don’t approve of fraud, no matter how bloated and greedy the target. However, that’s a question the book scarcely considers. The story is about love – Jules’ love for his parents, murdered by Nazis. His love for his wife, who died too soon. For his daughter and his grandchild. For a beautiful young student who is transparently smitten with him, and for a woman of more appropriate age whom he meets too late. But equally it’s about his love for Paris, and especially his love for music. The book is lush with gorgeous description and meditations on the meaning of it all. This is a book for reading slowly and savoring. It sweeps the reader into realms of transcendence.

Also, it meshed with – and helped to feed – my recent delusions of glimpsing some kind of Unified Theory of Existence. Helprin seems to have had some of the same thoughts I’ve had – maybe I stole some of them from him.

Insurance fraud aside, Paris In the Present Tense is a wonderful book. You ought to read it.

“Look,” he would say, “at home I have a stainless steel drain strainer, which when struck with a spoon produces a perfect, unclouded C with fifteen seconds of sustain. Were I younger I might be able to hear thirty seconds. The quality of beauty is implicit in my kitchen-sink strainer despite its uninspiring form and function – implicit in the steel, implicit in the form, and brought out by what? Accident? Perception? Illusion? Or perhaps by something greater, waiting to spring, that would sound, and sing, forever?”

A new Mark Helprin novel, as a rare an occurrence as that is, is always cause for celebration in my world. His latest is Paris In the Present Tense, a book, on the surface, about music. It’s essentially a caper story and a revenge story, though unlike any such that you’ve read before.

Our hero is Jules Lacour, seventy-five years old, a teacher of music at the Sorbonne. He is a Holocaust survivor, a veteran of the Algerian War, and a widower. A brilliant teacher, he has never advanced far in his career because he cares only for the music, not for fashionable theories.

Today he faces the prospect of seeing his only grandson die of cancer. Once, long ago, he was unable to save his parents’ lives. Now he will go to any length necessary to save this boy. Meanwhile, he kills two Arab boys one night, when he finds them trying to murder an orthodox Jew. The surviving assailant runs away shouting, “Racist!” which makes Jules the subject of a somewhat leisurely police investigation.

I won’t go into the plot any further, for fear of spoilers. The greatest pleasure here, as in all Helprin’s books, is in his digressions, the stories within the story, the flashbacks, the meditations, the long, baroque lists that render the narrative almost tactile.

Paris In the Present Tense is not my favorite of Helprin’s books, and parts of it are morally problematic. But Helprin doesn’t really need my approval, and Jules Lacour certainly doesn’t care about it. This is a rich, beautiful book with much to say to us about music, and about what music tells us about the nature of the universe. Social and political issues are addressed – especially the problem of resurgent antisemitism in France. But sops are thrown to the liberal side as well – a greedy corporation comes in for particular condemnation, and there are probably more sympathetic Muslim characters than strictly necessary.

Highly recommended.