If I cast back over the wars, famines, pandemics, and plagues, all the afflictions of nature and human nature, it seems clear to me that, as a necessity like breathing, the greater command of existence is to look beyond existence itself. Somewhere in the most delicate and invisible abstract is a point where all things come into balance, time stops, pain vanishes, and love and light are the same.

Imagine Death Wish, but recast in the form of a Baroque oratorio. That’s one way to attempt explaining Mark Helprin’s luminous latest novel, Elegy in Blue. Baroque is an appropriate adjective, because he has a very baroque style – he delights in lists, and catalogs, and endless iterations of ever-increasing granularity in detail, so that finally your brain surrenders and you just get caught up in the beauty of the words. And the beauty of the words is a major element of the meaning.

It’s also a hymn to the city of Brooklyn, which the narrator loves even as he watches it being corrupted.

This narrator is a retired New York investment banker who never divulges his name. Aside from service in Vietnam and the loss of his son in Iraq, he has generally had a privileged life, especially in his marriage to his wife Clare, whom he loves profoundly.

Then he happens across an act of evil in process, and he does the only decent thing, the thing any man should do. As a result, he loses everything and becomes a pariah, a broken man. When he learns of another evil act which he has the power to stop, will he have the courage to act again, knowing the price of virtue?

In a previous book, A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin gave us what I consider one of the great antiwar novels. But that should not be misunderstood as an affirmation of pacifism. The pacifists are some of the main villains of Elegy in Blue, cowards who resort to bromides like “cycle of violence” because they haven’t the guts to act against manifest evil.

Elegy in Blue is presented in intertwined chronology, so that sad endings are often described before happy beginnings. I steeled myself at first for the pain that was clearly coming, but on balance the story was mostly about love and joy, and the things that outlive us in the end.

As always in Helprin books, there was also a lot of humor. Dealing here with New York corporations and legal firms, he disports himself with monickers like Angier Francis Diphthahng, Bradford Pear, Simon Yachtsman, Hodgkins Chalmers, and Chalmers Hodgkins.

A Helprin book is a literary experience, intended to be savored and revisited. I loved Elegy in Blue and recommend it without reservation.