About "Winter's Tale"

This book just keeps getting weirder and weirder. 

The setting of the book is mostly at a newspaper in New York City called The Sun.  One of the things I like about the book is his use of vocabulary:  "These were ancient and elaborate constructs of iron, bras, and steel that took up half an acre in a collection of puffing samovars, madly racing wheels, sequipedalian drive rods in frantic intercourse with capacious cylinders..." (425).  I think he makes up at least half of his interesting vocabulary, but it sure makes his scenes vivid!

The book starts out with a character named Peter Lake who is a criminal in New York City around the turn of the 20th century.  Except it is New York, but it's not.  There are all these surreal moments of supernatural events - like snow storms that dump 20 feet of snow at one time, and walls of fog that chase people around. There are also fires that burn incessantly in the Projects, and nobody tries to put them out. Peter Lake is sort of part of a gang, but then they turn around and try to kill him. 

Then it switches to a rich family who own a newspaper called The Sun.  The family name is Penn and they like to vacation in this place called the Lake of the Coheeries.  One of their daughters, Beverly, has TB and likes to spend her time living on the roof of their mansion in New York - all winter.  When the family travels to the Lake of the Coheeries, she stays home.  Then Peter Lake breaks into her house, sees her playing the piano in the living room, and instantly falls in love.  She falls in love with him, too, and then tells her family they need to accept him.  They do, despite the fact that he is a criminal who was trying to rob them, because she is dying.  When she dies, Peter Lake goes back to his original ways, her father dies, her family is disbanded, and the house is torn down.  Part I of the book ends when Peter disappears off a bridge riding this magnificent white stallion that can fly; he is being chased by the gang and they're trying to kill him.

Part II switches to Virginia, who lives in the Lake of the Coheeries and it's somewhere around 90 years later.  A horrible winter sets in, food runs out, so she leaves for New York.  She has to climb this immense ice wall and slide down the other side to catch a boat on the Hudson River.  Once in New York, it turns out that no one has ever heard of the Lake of the Coheeries, it's not on any map, and anyone who has managed to make it there comes out with a wonderful, extremely creative vocabulary.  So she gets a job working at The Sun, the same newspaper from 90 years earlier, still owned by a member of the Penn family.  In the middle of all this, the reader learns of a man named Hardesty who is rich, but left it all behind in California, came East with only a silver platter engraved with a strange saying.  His train ends up getting stuck, where else, but at the Lake of the Coheeries, where he meets Virginia's mother, who sends him with a letter to find her daughter since she hasn't ever heard from her.  He finds Virginia, they fall in love, and he gets a job at The Sun.

I have just started Part III where Peter Lake shows up.  Evidently, the fog cloud has magical powers and he has slipped through time.  The stallion showed up out in the marshes, and he shows up in the middle of the river.  He has no idea how he has gotten here, but it's obvious he's headed for the same place everyone else is:  The Sun.

I can't decide if this book is brilliant and magical, or if the author tried to hard to make something profound.  At times I love his humor as he makes up weird words, and paints magical pictures of snow, ice, fog, greens, blues, stars, and fire.  Then at other times I get completely annoyed because everything is so disjointed.  I want to yell, "Get on with it!" 

I hope I have the patience, and the time to finish this thing.  I'm only on p. 422 out of 748.  We shall see.  Hopefully I can start to make things go as far as pace, and then things will start to make sense, as we head into Thanksgiving!