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�...

Jerome Charyn seems at first [in The Franklin Scare] to be writing a historical novel about the last days of FDR—the action takes place in 1944 and 1945—and he gives us Yalta, the altruism of Mrs. Roosevelt, and the obtrusive campaign of Dewey. But he refuses to offer official versions. He is after bigger game. By introducing perverse, mad and unreal characters, he suggests that "History," as we were taught it, is simply another story. Charyn mixes categories. He takes apparently...

"Once Upon a Droshky" was the title of Jerome Charyn's first novel, and that title might serve as a lead-in to his 12th and latest, "Secret Isaac." There are strong elements of the fairy tale in this curious book. Whores and pimps take the place of princesses and their keepers, big-city corruption is the glass mountain, politicians are the wizards, and Isaac Sidel, secret Isaac, is the disguised prince…. It's difficult to be sure what Jerome Charyn is getting...

[Jerome Charyn in "The Franklin Scare"] has tamed his prose and makes it perform tricks. It is a New York prose, street-smart, sly and full of lurches, like a series of subway stops on the way to hell. It sets its energy from popular culture, and its essential moral concerns arrive in a kind of drag of language, a hip uniform, thumbs hooked in the belt. It will never allow itself to sound corny, but, always in motion, always angling, it gets the job done, as if selling us a bridge or a silo of...

["The Seventh Babe" is] the American dream of baseball re-enacted as nightmare, a hallucinated image of what lies outside of the official histories and record books. Anyone brought up on the traditional myths is bound to find the novel irritating and disturbing. I certainly did. But then … there's a lot more to the game than its traditional myths. (p. 288) Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Two on Baseball," in The New York Times, Section III (© 1979 by...