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 rashly decide that The Catfish Man is going to show us how life in general, and Charyn's in particular, can be reimagined. To serve his metaphor, we can with a kick of our tails swim upstream against fate, especially if we're up to sniffing which way the current's flowing. I am, of course, mistaken—not least because one can't sniff the direction of current.
The knucklehead Jerome Charyn of the novel keeps kicking himself with obsessive vengeance into one cul-de-sac after another. Strung out along the waterway of his life are death-defying but dead-end bouts with YMHA weightlifting, championship Ping-Pong, New Orleans chess, American madness, a Texas prison, Chicano crime, and closet writing. His gusto in leaping from one to the next (even if a little green around the gills) may be a worthy tribute to American sticktoitiveness—but a tribute in some ways better fitted to a boy's adventure story. In fact, this Charyn, who scribbles stories about pirates and turns the life of Jefferson Davis into another Count of Monte Cristo, becomes an emblem of the failure of American manhood. The Catfish Man is another entry in our long literary tradition (which flows as far back as Natty Bumppo) of the male too mired in obsessions to develop passions, of the boy who never grows up….
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