Prince Frederick, known as Freddy, is big-eared and socially awkward. Though intelligent, he comes off instead as clownishly eccentric. Sound familiar? There's more. His wife, Fredericka, is blond, beautiful, shallow, consumed with fashion, and beloved by the press. Freddy copes with her, and with his wait to ascend the throne, by a longtime dalliance with a mistress. His life is a string of mishaps and social disasters with which, of course, the press has a field day. When press barons plot to trip him up even further, his family summons an adviser, who may or may not be Merlin. Freddy is sent packing with a mandate to earn the throne by conquering the colonies.
This could have been a promising premise, especially in the hands of Helprin, known for story collections and novels of intelligence and imagination, like ''Ellis Island," ''A Soldier of the Great War," and ''Winter's Tale." For the last few years, he has also contributed Wall Street Journal commentaries on politics and military history. Why he chose to infuse his latest work with this latter background, instead of his usual fictional grace, is a mystery. Alas, what his publisher promises as ''de Tocqueville rewritten by Mark Twain" is instead a strained, overstuffed, and overlong work that reads more like Evelyn Waugh rewritten by Benny Hill.
