Mark Helprin's "In Sunlight and in Shadow" If "In Sunlight and in Shadow" did not have Mark Helprin's name plastered on the cover, a reader might surmise that the author was someone desperately trying to imitate Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts. Written from the hero's rather than the heroine's point of view, this 700-plus-page tome is a bad romance novel, driven by a preposterous, melodramatic plot and filled with some truly cringe-making prose. It's astonishing to think that the author of the delightful 2005 novel "Freddy and Fredericka" and the critically acclaimed "Ellis Island, and Other Stories," could have written such a laughably awful book. It's 1946, and Mr. Helprin's hero, Harry Copeland, a former soldier, has recently returned home to New York after several near-death experiences fighting the Nazis. He was sustained "in times of the greatest misery or danger" by his dream of finding "the woman for whom he had been made." He spots that very woman on the Staten Island Ferry - a woman named Catherine, whose "hair trapped the sun and seemed to radiate light" - and vows to marry her. Never mind that Catherine is about to have a fancy engagement party in the Hamptons and already thinks of herself as being "more or less married" to her fiancé, Victor. It turns out that Victor raped Catherine when she was 13 (and he was 29), and that everyone who knows them, including their prominent families, has been expecting them to marry for years. Needless to say, Harry will not let this stand: he makes a dramatic appearance at the engagement party, and somehow - miraculously - comes away with Catherine. The two immediately fall truly, madly, deeply in love, and after winning the approval of her wealthy parents, seem destined to live happily ever after. Except, of course, that Mr. Helprin has several hundred more pages to go, and so there are complications - lots and lots of them. They include Harry's struggles with his father's leather goods business and the mob's efforts to extract protection money from him; his difficulties in coming to terms with his harrowing experiences during the war; Catherine's struggles with her career as a singer and actress; and her fears that Victor will somehow exact vengeance on her or Harry. In the past Mr. Helprin has found some useful vessels to channel his hyperactive imagination, using elements of fantasy, the picaresque and the epic in works like "Memoir From Antproof Case," "Freddy and Fredericka" and "Winter's Tale." In the straightforwardly realistic "Sunlight," however, what might have seemed bravura or inventive in another context simply feels silly or over the top. When Harry meets Victor, his first impulse is to kill him; later he plots to kill a man, Verderamé, who's trying to extort money from him. While Harry is supposed to be an idealistic, expensively educated young man, he would rather violently face down his enemies - both of whom, oddly, have names beginning with V - than consider the help offered to him by Catherine's father or go to the police. The behavior of Catherine's doting parents is similarly bizarre: though they seem to care genuinely about her happiness, they did nothing to protect her from Victor's assault on her as a teenager, or to prevent her engagement to this predator. In fact, Victor is depicted in particularly ludicrous terms. He's an imbecilic Yalie who actually goes around humming "Boola boola, boola boola, boola boola, boola boola, boola boola, boola boola, boola boola, boola boo!" Mr. Helprin also tells us that Victor had an important epiphany during his junior year in college, when he looked at his room-length closet filled with beautiful clothes and felt "a marvelous, ecstatic, pre-orgasmic contentment, white foaming oceans of it frothing in his mind as the birds outside sang of Eli." For that matter, the language throughout is so maudlin, clichéd and portentous that the novel reads like an energetic parody. The clerk who marries Harry and Catherine takes one look at them and thinks: "Here was not only great love, but peril. This was an exceptional marriage. As for Harry, he tells a friend that he is so in love with Catherine that "if going to her meant that I would die, I would go to her." We're also told that Harry thought he could never understand Catherine's mother because "he had never been a woman. He had never been a mother. He had never been middle-aged. He had never been a socialite. He had never been a Christian, a debutante, or had cellulite (although she didn't either). Every emotion in this novel is italicized. Every description pumped full of treacle. When Catherine tells her parents that she is standing by Harry's decision to take on the gangsters threatening his business, Mr. Helprin writes that her family had never "stood prouder, except perhaps long before, when they had gone out to chase whales, or cross the sea, or rebel against the mother country." And when Catherine goes onstage, after receiving bad reviews, he writes this: "That was her task now, to hold through, with no guarantee, like all those in gray who filled the streets on the way to their jobs, anonymous from birth to death and thereafter, the little people, so called, who so often were as brave as soldiers and as great as kings." Such breathy, inflated sentences may be even worse than this embarrassing novel's cardboard characters and absurdly hokey plot.