“Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare” (“Love moved me, which makes me speak”). So declares Virgil to Dante at the outset of The Divine Comedy, explaining why he has come to serve as Dante’s guide through Hell: love set him in motion.Mark Helprin takes this line from Canto II of Inferno as the epigraph for his new novel, Elegy in Blue: A Novel, and the choice, we come to see, is not decorative; it is thematic. In the pages that follow, Helprin attempts to write a book in which love is not merely the subject but the animating force of the prose itself — the reason to write at all.The narrator of Elegy in Blue is an unnamed, recently retired 82-year-old Wall Street investment banker living in Brooklyn Heights. As soon as we meet him, he tells us that he is about to be killed. Since he has nothing to lose, he can say exactly what he wants. What he wants to say is addressed to Clare, his late wife. “When you write,” he confesses, “you have the secret, unfounded hope that somehow the magic of the written word can leap beyond the constraints of mortality, and that with divine leave even the dead can read what is in your heart.” Helprin has found a framing conceit that a certain Tuscan poet made use of over 700 years ago: the dying man writing to his dead beloved across the silence of the grave. Clare is his Beatrice. Elegy in Blue is his Comedy.Dante’s shadow stretches across the novel. The narrator moves through a world in which the question of whether love can survive death is posed on nearly every page. His allusions befit a man who has lived long with great books: Homer, Shakespeare, Boswell, Whitman, H.G. Wells, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all make appearances. Ecclesiastes is present, implicitly, beneath his meditations on the leveling that awaits us all. “In the end we stand with them in the same line,” the narrator says, “in silence and in the dark, with no cutting in.” Yet the Dantean frame remains paramount. When the narrator writes of hoping to “join with others in the world of shades,” or invokes Inferno’s most famous line in confessing that he has given up hope, the Comedy is quietly proposed as a counterweight to Ecclesiastes’s existential despair: perhaps it is possible to pass through Hell and reunite with one’s loved ones in Heaven.Helprin’s prose, at its finest, fully earns this literary company. The novel opens with a beautiful, rhapsodic passage on the sky above Brooklyn on a perfect October afternoon. As the narrator recalls, thousands of geese, too high to be seen clearly, passed over the city on their southward migration, their calls drifting down “faintly, beautifully, mournfully” through the unobstructed air. His wife and infant son were a few flights below, waiting. Here, Helprin is doing what only the best lyric novelists can do: catching a moment of ordinary happiness with such precision that it becomes the axis around which a whole life turns. That it is followed by death and loss and violence only deepens the pathos.