Jerome Charyn (born 1937) is an American novelist. Charyn was born in the Bronx area of New York and was educated at Columbia (BA, 1959). He has written 37 novels including three memoirs about his childhood in the Bronx, The Dark Lady from Belorusse,...
Jerome Charyn looks for himself, though he never quite comes out and says so in SAVAGE SHORTHAND: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ISAAC BABEL (Random House, $24.95). This contentious and engrossing hybrid of a book is part biography--of a Russian writer "with glasses on...
LIKE A cunningly spun serve, this book comes towards you and then swerves off in a completely unexpected direction. It is subtitled Ping- Pong and The Art of Staying Alive and, among many other things, does indeed address the question of whether playing ping-pong...
Jerome Charyn seems to handicap himself right off by giving the first-person lead of [The Catfish Man] to a ringer named "Jerome Charyn." Hasn't the word gone out among novelists to lay off that one for a while? But then, one of Charyn's best acts is playing dumb. His apparently self-assertive gesture gives this mock autobiography … an atmosphere of flaky exhiliration. No snob appeal here, and the subtitle offers us "a conjured life," so as I begin to read I ...
You've got to attend closely to Jerome Charyn. He's ambitious, daring, but quietly so. "The Seventh Babe" starts out as a fairly conventional baseball novel but modulates into something more strange and wonderful and decidedly south-of-the-border. (p. 12) [Well] before the book is half over, Mr. Charyn explodes the genre and the reader's expectations. Rags turns out to be neither orphan nor hayseed, but the son of a copper millionaire. So much for the coming of age of a yo...
[Mr. Charyn's] operating principle is to behave as if there were no such thing as an anti-climax; as if, whether or not there's a palace of wisdom at the end of it, the road of excess is the only road to take. He is determined at all costs to be the sort of novelist that appalled Ford Madox Ford—a novelist of the new breed as described and exemplified by Wyndham Lewis: "Letting off brilliant fireworks. Performing like dogs on tight ropes. Something to give them the idea they�...
