Kurt Andersen: Mark Helprin is the author of two of my favorite novels by any living writer, Refiner's Fire and Winter's Tale, and I am thrilled to have him join me now in the studio. His biography reminds me of a kind of modern Candide. He met Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; he served in the Israeli air force and the British merchant navy; He fell down an icy mountain crevasse. He worked as a surveyor, and as a dishwasher, and as a speechwriter for Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996. And one time on a backstreet of a seedy industrial town just north of New York City , Mark Helprin saw the Queen Mother. His new novel is called Freddy and Fredericka , and has to do with British royalty popping up in unexpected places. Mark Helprin, welcome to Studio 360.

Mark Helprin: Thank you very much.

Kurt Andersen: Tell me now about Freddy and Fredericka, who are they?

Mark Helprin: They are a paradigmatic prince and princess of Whales, based upon them.

Kurt Andersen: On Charles and Diana?

Mark Helprin: On Charles and Diana, but they are different of course. They are in a way what Charles and Diana could have been had they had had better luck, fortune, and been more open to breaking out of the prison in which any prince and princess of Whales would find themselves.

Kurt Andersen: And essentially they become something like secret agents implanted in American, and basically rollicking pages of adventure ensue. Did you begin with simply that notion of a prince and princess of Whales dropped into the belly of the American beast?

Mark Helprin: What happened was in the early 90s, when my children were very little, we were in a restaurant, and it was one of those restaurants where you can look through a window into the kitchen. And there were people who were busboys and dishwashers, and one of my children, who was very, you know a tiny tot, looked and said, "Are those the prince and princess of Whales?" And I said "No, they're not." But then it started me to thinking, what if they were? What if they were taken out of their world and put in that one? And of course that has a very long history, I guess it goes back beyond Greek mythology when the gods come down and masquerade as mortals. And their adventures have always been fascinating in literature, and the whole incognito literature, Mark Twain is I guess the most recent American example I can think of off hand.

Kurt Andersen: In Prince and the Pauper especially.

Yeah, exactly, so that's always fascinated me. I wish I knew what the presidents did. I mean for instance we know that Roosevelt and Taft used to go down from the White House and walk to the Potomac by themselves and then swim in the Potomac in the nude. And we know that Truman, after, just after he was president, well when Truman was president, he would walk out of the white house by himself across the street to the drugstore and sit at the counter and order a sandwich. It's always nice when someone in that position becomes like us.

Kurt Andersen: Freddy and Fredericka is big and epic like your previous novels, but although you have had moments of picaresque humor in your books before, I never would have figured you for a writer of this kind of screwball comedy. And I wonder if, as you decided to write this book, if you thought of it as a left or right turn.

Mark Helprin: Well, I have written all these books and they're all I hope consequential and deep and moving and everything. And I thought, I'll take a break from being, pretending anyway, to art, and I'll do a comedy, 'cause a comedy can be art too. After all, if Shakespeare can write comedy, so can anybody. Or that doesn't right. If he could, then it's something worthy of anyone to try. I was having a lot of fun writing it. I always said to myself, as I was writing it, I would love to be the fly on the wall the see the prince and the princess of Whales landing in American with nothing. No money, no resources, no contact, no nothing, and having to make their way on the bump. Which is something, by the way, that I've done quite a lot, I did in my youth. No money, hitchhiking, just surviving by my wits. And what if they had to do that? Because they're not accustomed to that. To actually be in urban situations, contact with people, riding freight trains and making your living solely by whit, is something that, to me, would be fascinating to watch them do.

Kurt Andersen: Which is, as they say in Hollywood , a very 'high concept' idea. I know you've had ungenerous and unkind things to say about Hollywood in the past. This book, it seems to me, begs to become a movie. Do you agree?

Mark Helprin: I think so. It really does. We have yet to receive the storm of supplicants from Hollywood , who will bang down the doors to offer me millions of dollars for it, but I do believe that someone will come.

Kurt Andersen: Mark Helprin, I want to thank you very much for coming into Studio 360 today.

Mark Helprin: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Kurt Andersen: Mark Helprin's new novel is called Freddy and Fredericka .

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