Word: charyn
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FICTION: Adjacent Lives, Ellen Schwamm ∙Faeries, Brian Fraud and Alan Lee ∙Secret Isaac, Jerome Charyn ∙Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever ∙The World According to Garp, John Irving War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk
SECRET ISAAC by Jerome Charyn Arbor House; 315 pages...
...Jerome Charyn exerts energies that could make a turbine envious. At 41 he has published his twelfth novel, an adrenal tour of Manhattan, Dublin and parts unknown. The title character is a grief-racked, unshaven drifter who caroms around in search of trouble. The quest is professional: Isaac Sidel is first deputy police commissioner, a plainclothesman eaten by dreams and ravaged by a tape worm fastened to his entrails...
...grab the wall." In Ireland, the sky is so dark, "the elves must have put a roof on Cashel Hill." Shouts of murderers and comedians sound across the Hudson and Liffey rivers. Episodes in Nighttown and the underworld consciously echo the rhythms of James Joyce and Saul Bellow, but Charyn manages to sustain his own peculiar tone, a unique amalgam of psychological insight and scatological farce. It is one of the most unlikely and compeling literary combinations since T.S. Eliot's Gerontion mixed garlic and sapphires...
This volume is the second part of a crime-and-punishment trilogy that be gan with Blue Eyes (1974) and will be completed with the publication next fall of The Education of Patrick Silver, in which Isaac rides again. The prolific Charyn, 38, an associate professor of English at the City University of New York, also has two other works in progress, including the history of an imaginary European kingdom called Whalebone. A resourceful scavenger of story ideas, Charyn says the inspiration for the Isaac trilogy came from night mares of his brother, a homicide detective in the New York...