Perfection (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Helprin published The Pacific and Other Stories, the collection in which "Perfection" appears, in 2004, after a seven-year absence from fiction publishing. The critical reception was mostly positive, although Helprin's embrace of such old-fashioned themes as beauty, truth, and honor, and his affirmation of moral absolutes, was not universally admired.

In his mostly enthusiastic review for Newsday entitled "Glimpses of Lives Honed on Honor," Dan Cryer remarks that Helprin is an "unabashed cultural conservative" who writes about "great qualities" without irony or "the wink of postmodernist qualification." While he calls the collection "uneven," Cryer notes that it has a coherent theme, "the grace imparted by a life honed on honor." He singles out "Perfection" as an "exuberant story" and "one of the oddest, and funniest, of baseball stories," combining magical realism with an "unabashed moral focus." Overall though, Cryer's main criticism of the collection is that sometimes the stories fall into "heavy-handed didacticism."

Michiko Kakutani, in his review for the International Herald Tribune, was less impressed. Kakutani comments that "Helprin's focus on moral absolutes seems to have hardened, if not calcified," resulting in "heavy-handed, stage-managed fictions," which display a "growing sanctimony."

In her review for the San Francisco Chronicle, "Fuzzy Lives in Perfect Detail: Characters Act Precisely as They Seek Redemption," Jennie Yabroff highlights a feature of the stories that is simultaneously a strength and a weakness. "God," she writes, "is in Helprin's details." She praises Helprin's precise and lucid descriptions of how things work (examples might include Roger's explanation of how canal locks and door locks work and the narrator's detailed description of a baseball game) but feels that the characters lack emotional depth. Pointing out that "Most of his male characters are uncommonly brave," she comments: "Helprin becomes a generalist when writing about how people operate. His stories read more like fables than observations of actual human behavior."

No such reservations are recorded by the Los Angeles Times critic, Nick Owchar, in his review, "Appreciating Life's Moments of Perfection." Owchar calls the collection "splendid" and notes that it has "plenty of magic" of the "earthly, human" kind. Owchar identifies a consistent theme in the collection that also applies to "Perfection": "attaining holiness and practicing charity in an age obsessed with science and reason. Helprin presents us with people confronting life's ugliness with small acts of perfection." He praises "Perfection" as "exquisite," noting that the abundant comedy in the story is "underscored by a tragic sense of cosmic balance."