By Priya Jain

July 10, 2005 | 8:00 p.m

Freddy and Fredericka, by Mark Helprin. The Penguin Press, 553 pages, $27.95.

Where do you go, after 58 years of life, when you've graduated from Harvard and Oxford, written four critically adored novels and three story collections-not to mention three children's books-won the Prix de Rome, been called a literary genius, become a respected political commentator, and single-handedly recharged (at least temporarily), through your considerable oratorical skills, Bob Dole's flatlining Presidential campaign? To farce, it seems. The indelible, overachieving Mark Helprin, having done just about everything else, has produced, for his fifth novel, 573 pages of truly funny farce tucked around an earnest treatise on man's capacity for greatness. An epic quest narrative heavily dosed with Monty Python–style silliness, Freddy and Fredericka is one of the most delightfully odd and truly surprising novels to come around in a long time. The title characters are the Prince and Princess of Wales, eccentric beings both rotted, in very different ways, by a life of idleness. Fredericka is a pretty, blond airhead whose life revolves around elaborate grooming rituals and posing for magazine covers, a media darling whose idiotic pronouncements are eclipsed by the dazzling sight of her cleavage. Freddy (repeated references to his large ears, physical awkwardness and lack of interest in his wife make it clear he's a thinly disguised Prince Charles) is an honorable and serious fellow who takes his family's 1,000-year legacy seriously, but who's also a social misfit whose frequent gaffes have convinced the world that he's insane. (Through a rather convoluted misunderstanding born from Freddy's royal accent, the public thinks that he thinks he's a Jewish Arab named Hussein. And looking for Fredericka's lost dog, named for her nutritionist-who died of malnutrition-has him running around town screaming "Pha-Kew!") The novel opens with the fourth of five attempts at a test to see if Freddy is fit to be king: He must coax into flight the queen's falcon, trained to take wing only for those worthy of the throne. (In Mr. Helprin's alternative history, Edward VIII had to abdicate not because he fell in love with a married woman, but because the royal falcon refused to fly for him.) Alas, the bird won't leave Freddy's arm either, and the queen, desperate to prepare Freddy for his last shot at flying the bird, has him and Fredericka, on the advice of an ancient and magical advisor named Mr. Neil, dropped by parachute, naked and penniless, into New Jersey. If they can recapture the colonies for the British, Freddy will have earned the right to be king. Freddy and Fredericka-now with the alias identities of Alabaman dentists named Desi and Popeel Moofoomooach-run into a motorcycle gang, hitch a ride with the self-proclaimed King of the Gypsies, wash dishes and pound railway spikes in Chicago, take a turn at dentistry in Nebraska, and live in a fire tower in California-all before getting entangled in a Presidential election in which Freddy writes grand, lofty speeches for Dewey Knott, a hapless G.O.P. candidate who engages in a who's-on-first routine with anyone who asks him a question with the word "not" in it. Mr. Helprin is a clever writer, and this novel is filled with wicked little lines. On Mr. Neil: "He was a Bohemian according to Freddy's definition of such people, which was that their hair seemed to be in pain." And the Gypsy King "was as buoyant as a natural politician or an empty bottle." While the goofy routines and plot twists are more often than not quite funny, these quick comic riffs are what keep the writing alive. Underneath the travelogue of the couple's vagabond adventures and the mocking portraits of politicians and monarchs lies a meditation on leadership, public expectation and what it means to have a birthright. (Call it the Arthurian theme: The wizardly Mr. Neil is an anagram of Merlin.) "Why is a king," Mr. Helprin asks, "who by accident of birth must submit to the will and expectation of scores of millions, or even (as in the case of the British, world-apparent monarchy) thousands of millions, savagely held to account as he forges a tormented youth into what must appear on Coronation Day to be a royal being of evident perfection?" Freddy doesn't want to be king, but he's aware of his duty; he solemnly declares, "I would die rather than betray continuity, for its own sake if for nothing else." Even as he spoofs the current tacky state of the British royal family, Mr. Helprin holds them to ancient standards of strength and righteousness. For the most part, Mr. Helprin deftly handles the switch between comedy and epic drama, but there are long stretches of both that sink into boring repetition. Silliness and studied gravity, in large proportions, are wearying, and Freddy and Fredericka should have been cut by at least 100 pages. The sections on American politics are the weakest: Though there's some accuracy in the portrayal of Presidential candidates as self-serving buffoons, Knott and the incumbent President August Self are little more than vague caricatures. For that matter, Freddy and Fredericka aren't enduring characters; they're amusingly conceived vessels for Mr. Helprin's big ideas. It's hard to fault him for these moments of weakness. He's taken a huge, risky stab at something totally original, and the result is more interesting than a safe, neatly polished novel. In Winter's Tale (1983), Mr. Helprin wrote, "I've imagined great victories, and I've imagined great races. The races are better." Freddy and Fredericka may not be a great victory, but it's a thrilling race. Priya Jain, an editor at The Brooklyn Rail, has written about books and culture for Salon, The New York Press and other publications.