Freddy and Fredericka is a very strange book! It is a fictional memoir of a fictional Prince of Wales and his Princess. It is very silly and sometimes pure nonsense. It follows the path of maturity of Freddy from presumptive future King of England to actual King of England. He and his wife, Fredericka through a year in which they are sent to America and have to fend for themselves incognito.
It is also a love story and bitter sweet.
Between the nonsense is prose describing the ridiculousness of politics, the hearts of people, the beauty of life and living, and the understanding of destiny... ( )

Reminds me a little of Thomas Pynchon; not quite as weird, perhaps. I’ve read Refiner’s Fire, A Winters Tale, A Soldier of the Great War (best), and Memoirs From An Ant-Proof Case (worst), but the current review is about Freddy and Fredericka. The titular couple are a Prince of Wales with large ears, and his ditzy fashion plate princess. Condemned by the press for being goofy in public (prince) and showing too much bosom (princess), they endanger the Monarchy and are ordered to comply with a secret ancient tradition to prove their right to the throne – sent to a distant and barbarous land to conquer it. In this case, parachuted naked into New Jersey.


In the USA they learn how to work for a living – cleaning lavatories, washing dishes, railroad maintenance, and posing as dentists – so they will learn how Ordinary Folks live. Well, I’m all for the virtues of honest toil. And I’m entirely sympathetic when the erstwhile royal couple has to spend a winter in Chicago, having done so myself – many times. It’s done pretty well.


Alas, it needs just a little more editing. Helprin has always liked wordplay and puns, but he lets himself go a little too far – Freddy is having an affair with Lady Phoebe Boillinghotte, and an overly long episode takes place in Moncay House – presumably because Helprin thinks we didn’t get it the first time. Freddy’s always in trouble with the press because he’s misunderstood, and – as one example - there’s a page-long dialog in which a newscaster misinterprets Freddy’s comment “My father (who’s sane)” as “My father, Hussein”. Not very funny the first time, and gets really old quickly (although I confess I always thought “Who’s on First” was overrated, too). Helprin is much better when he does throwaways:


(speaking of Americans):

”Can you imagine them at the Garden Party, dressed in leather, chains, turbans, and street clothes born in the circus, speaking in their atrocious accents, with pierced body parts, tattoos, and rooster hair?”

“We wouldn’t invite the intellectuals.”

The main irony of Freddy and Fredericka is that Helprin wrote it long after the models were divorced and/or dead. A good deal of the book is a paean of praise to the British monarchy (to be fair, a good deal is praise of America, too). Alas, I can’t quite suspend disbelief enough to imagine Prince Charles is actually a misunderstood intellectual who is portrayed as a jerk by the press; I find it more likely that his intellectual accomplishments are exaggerated rather than diminished. Well, it’s kind of a fantasy novel, after all. As for the late Princess Diana, although certainly beautiful, she never gave the impression of being more cerebral than one of the larger citrus fruits. Freddy and Fredericka are more majestic than their prototypes.


Got it for a dollar at a yard sale; well worth it, since it made me laugh out loud a couple of times. If you are going to read Helprin, it’s probably better to start with A Winter’s Tale or A Soldier of the Great War, though. ( )

Note: This is the audiobook version of this book, read by Robert Ian MacKenzie, which is a monumental 26 hours long.


I absolutely adore some of Helprin's work. Winter's Tale is one of my very favorite books ever, and some of the stories in The Pacific are magnificent. The trouble with F&F is the length.

What I love are Helprin's vivid descriptions, his exquisite language, his cutting commentary on modern culture, and his gorgeous range of vocabulary.

What makes me crazy is the plodding, tiresome pace of the first half of this book. The story doesn't find its pace until just before the midpoint of the novel...and honestly I would've put it down if there hadn't been a lurking desire to know what happened next.

The trouble is the lack of emotional investment in the characters for the first almost-half of the book.

And yet. Helprin is a brilliant OBSERVER of humanity and this book is ultimately a journey from shallow narcissism to a much deeper awareness of what it means to be a good person and what it means to live as a member of a community of people, rich and poor, all over the world.

It's a common theme in his writing, and the prince and princess of Wales conceit is an interesting venue for it. But I wonder who his audience is this time. So much of the intended humor of this book falls flat for me -- not because the idea isn't funny but because the satire drags on for far, far too long. Half a dozen scenes could've been cut entirely and the book made better for it.

The second half of the novel, however, is a solidly good read. And I wonder where Helprin's editor was because a few tweaks and tightenings of the pacing would have made this a fantastic book.

Still, the journey as a whole is worth it. I'd have preferred a paper copy, so I could have read faster than the narrator read and skimmed the bits that dragged. I'm NOT a fan of extended miscommunication-humor, as Helprin is, so those scenes were all a chore for me, but I see that at least some of them were vital to the satire.


The one really lovely thing about the audiobook version is the interview with Helprin at the end, where he tells stories of his youth riding trains and adventuring, and of being in the inner circle of British royalty and famous actors as a child in London. (He grew up half in New York and half in Europe.) Fascinating stuff and I would adore it if he were to write an autobiography. He seems to have lived an amazing life.

Anyway, the second half was very good, the interview rocked, and the first half was a chore. I think that averages out to 3 stars on this scale...or, in other words, one to get from the library rather than to buy, but still one to remember fondly for quite a lot of stunningly beautiful scenes. ( )

"He pointed quaquaversally with all his fingers." I don't even want to look this up, because the colloquial Italian (or southeastern Sicilian) for "thataway" or "straight ahead" or "keep going" is "qua qua qua." if the character is waggling in fingers in another way than that, I don't want to know. (p. 349.)

The author is Usan and the book was printed here. It uses double quotation marks in dialogue, which is only sane (how do you distinguish single quotation marks from apostrophes?) and mostly Usan spellings and the word "gotten," but it doesn't use periods after Mr and Dr and just (373) had "revolutionised." I'm confused ( )

It took me a while to get into this, but once I did, I really enjoyed it. ( )