Word: charyn
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MARILYN THE WILD by JEROME CHARYN 246 pages. Arbor House...
Marilyn the Wild is flawed by its own rampaging vitality. A Charyn character cannot simply put on a coat: Es ther Rose's "fist burrowed into her sleeve like the skull of a groundhog...
...least of the novelist's functions is to serve as a moral bookkeeper, making all those entries on the liability side of the ledger that a society might otherwise prefer to forget. In his new book, ruefully comic Novelist Jerome Charyn (Once Upon a Droshky) records the shape and the existence of a small, dreadful chapter in our recent national history...
...Author Charyn zooms in upon the Tanaka family, Niseis held at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. Switching angles and changing focuses, splicing bits and pieces sharp as shards, he re-creates their barbed world in a manner often confusing but finally effective. With their mother dispatched to another relocation camp i,n Montana, the father has abdicated his paterfamilias function. Instead, Fumiko, an older married sister, tries to hold the assorted family together: Ruby, a 13-year-old kid sister who becomes pregnant; Napoleon, her kid brother who dreams of becoming a Navy bombardier; Chuichi, a bitter...
...Author Charyn knows how to make a pratfall out of a pitfall, how to convert sordid realism into a sort of surrealism. The residual moral is as harrowing as the punch line of a good black-humor joke is meant to be-what cruelly absurd ends men are capable of reaching simply by being cool and reasonable...