Word: isaac
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...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...
Deep in middle age, Isaac has suddenly acquired the wisdom of a sage and the passions of a schoolboy. In his rag picker's guise he becomes smitten with Annie Powell, a beautiful hooker disfigured by a D-shaped scar carved in her cheek...
...scarlet letter was placed there by her crooked Irish lover, Dermott Bride. Isaac's tale of jealousy and vengeance is a simple one, diverted by the author's irrepressible gusto: in New York, a woman's eyes turn "a green that was so fierce, Isaac had to 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...
...Isaac Bashevis Singer, recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, will not appear here next week because his doctor told him to cancel all appointments for the next three weeks, Ruben G. Perlmutter '79, chairman of the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel Society, said yesterday...