The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Isaac Quartet: Blue Eyes, Marilyn the Wild, The Education of Patrick Silver, Secret Isaac, by Jerome Charyn
reviewed by James Sallis

Jerome Charyn. The Isaac Quartet: Blue Eyes, Marilyn the Wild, The Education of Patrick Silver, Secret Isaac. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. 610 pp. $35.00.

Jerome Charyn is a writer of extraordinary power, one of America’s great originals. His supercharged language pushes itself and readers almost to the point of hysteria, each sentence carrying more pure narrative drive, more fascination and surprise, than multiple pages of other writers. Sentence after sentence rolls from his hand like fate’s own dice, each a perfect small chapter, gnomic, expansive: beautiful and grotesque at the same time. Wanting always to “find the magic,” Charyn has little interest in the discarded husks of daily life. (“I am not interested in impersonation, I am interested in hallucination.”) His work ranges widely—from the satire of Tar Baby to the loose magic realism of War Cries over Avenue C and The Paradise Man, from sui generis “conjured autobiographies” such as The Catfish Man and Pinocchio’s Nose to what may well be the ultimate novel of paranoia, Death of a Tango King—but at the center of it all there’s an essential Charyn. That Charyn, a moralist in some crucial way, wants simultaneously to bear true witness, to dance on reality’s bones, and to write endlessly re-readable books. Profound ambition here, and talent to match. It was in these four proto-mysteries, first published in 1974 through 1978, that Charyn hammered out, on the anvil of a seemingly commercial fiction, both a vision of America and a style that struggles to convey that vision in all its sensory variegation, all its physical and emotional bludgeoning, all its unforgiving duplicities.