Book Review of Jerome Charyn's Under the Eye of God

Under the Eye of God
by Jerome Charyn

God knows this book comes just in time. I've stared so long at Nate Silver's New York Times political blog, his stats dance before my eyes. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy boggles my mind and hurts my heart. A good break is sitting in the tub with Jerome Charyn's Under the Eye of God, a book swarming with the shenanigans of warring politicians and the plumb-crazy powerful.

Here's the scoop: A bare-knuckles presidential election is over, and the Democratic ticket of baseball czar J. Michael Storm and New York City Mayor Isaac Sidel has won. Since this is a Charyn novel, J. Michael and Isaac are hardly sprawling in comfy chairs sipping a glass of bubbly to celebrate "the slaughter of '88." Nope.

J. Michael, the President-elect, is facing a political Sandy of his own. He's holed up in the Waldorf while one mistress after another surfaces with demands to be paid off or else. The media are sniffing his crooked real estate deals and the phony corporation he'd formed with his wife Clarice. (Did you know our Constitution is silent on what happens if scandal derails a President after election but before confirmation by the electoral college? Strictly speaking, he's not really the President-elect at all.) Luckily for the Democrats, they have pictures of the defeated Republican incumbent, President Calder Cottonwood, pissing in the Rose Garden, and if the Republicans don't stop harping about Casanova (er, J. Michael), Democrats will play a little hardball. The Democrats have also bugged the White House. (Ah, but the crafty Republicans know about it and talk accordingly.) Cottonwood has plans for a smear campaign charging Isaac with Lolita tendencies because of his friendship with the President-elect's 12-year-old daughter, Marianna.

The Democratic Party's chief strategist has decided the hugely popular Isaac needs to distract from J. Michael's bad press by hitting the road on "some kind of quixotic quest." So Isaac is tossed into a tour bus bound for Texas. Also aboard is the President's former astrologer, who can chart Isaac's stars. While the Secret Service checks out weirdos in the San Antonio hotel bar, a Korean War vet yells he's the eye of God and tries to shoot Isaac; however, Isaac thwarts him. Isaac suspects that President Cottonwood has just tried to have him killed.

Isaac returns to Manhattan, where he seeks the comfort of the Ansonia––"a universe unto itself, forlorn, complete, with an astonishing silence where Isaac could listen to iron and glass and marble breathe." It was the only address worth having for tenants such as Caruso, Babe Ruth, and Arnold Rothstein, the king of crime. Rothstein's former protégé, David Pearl, helped Isaac's father win a contract to supply the Army with gloves. David also enjoyed the company of the 10-year-old Isaac, who could "see with his ears, like a detective." Isaac finds the ex-boy venture capitalist still living at the Ansonia. Also there is a stunningly beautiful woman named Trudy Winckleman, going by the name of Rothstein's mistress Inez, hanging out with the world's richest men in the basement, and living in Inez's old rooms. Isaac is captivated, just as David hoped. David is moving heaven and earth in his attempts to ensure Isaac disappears or gets kicked upstairs. Vice President Sidel couldn't hurt him, but Mayor Sidel could. Isaac would stop at nothing to protect New York City.

*****

For those poor souls  who have yet to meet Isaac Sidel, Under the Eye of God is a good place to start. It's the eleventh book in this unusual noir-ish series about the New York City cop turned commissioner turned mayor turned Vice President-elect; however, it stands on its own, and it's actually an easy introduction to Charyn's writing style. While it's hard to describe exactly what that style is, maybe I'd call it funky and sly. In musical terms, it's a jazz riff. It's not exactly postmodern stream-of-consciousness writing, but the journey is at least as important as the destination. If you seek a nonlinear plot, look elsewhere. I read Charyn's Isaac books in a purposefully relaxed way so I can go with the rhythm of the prose, and I keep a Wikipedia window open on my computer for looking up the many cultural references and names of famous architects, artists, political figures, criminals, and writers (NYC Mayor Seth Low, Tammany Hall's Big Tim Sullivan, and artist Mark Rothko are just a few).

Charyn is a literary writer who adores words, and his writing is very vivid ("His mouth sat crooked on his face, as if someone had sewn it there"). He often employs nicknames or descriptions in lieu of names, as if repeating a name is simply too boring. So rather than repetitions of "Isaac Sidel," it's the Big Guy, the Citizen, Citizen Sidel, the May baby, the Commish, the catcher of criminals, the philosopher clown, etc. Other characters are named in similar fashion.

The Bronx

As in all Isaac Sidel books, New York City is a character, as well as a setting. The focus in this particular book is on the Bronx and Manhattan's Ansonia. Charyn grew up in the Bronx and attended Columbia University. He is familiar with the history, politics, and geography of New York City; the arts; and the sports of baseball and ping pong. This knowledge is seamlessly woven into his crime fiction. In Under the Eye of God, looking past the lunatic actions of the characters, one sees the serious issues of partisan politics, corruption, conspiracy theories, violence, urban blight and renewal, the power of the insanely wealthy, the powerlessness of the poor, and the kind of personal relationships that haunt us. This is a superb series, and this topical book is a gift from the gods.

Notes: Isaac and the crazy cast of Charyn characters are being made into an adult animated drama series called Hard Apple. The team behind it is the award-winning animators of Waltz with Bashir, the Cannes Film selection that also won a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Film.

Here's a mini-documentary about writer Jerome Charyn.

I received a free copy of Under the Eye of God, published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media, and due out today. The French translation of Under the Eye of God is also coming out in France. (The French are die-hard Isaac Sidel fans. They can read a review in Le Figaro here.)

Set Your Brain a-Spin: Read Blue Eyes by Jerome Charyn

Have you ever jumped rope with your brain? Juggled with it or bounced it on the floor like a basketball? All these games involve finding a comfortable rhythm. Reading a book by an author who's very creative, playful, and energetic can be a challenge, but once you settle into the book's rhythm, it can be extremely rewarding. Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace have written books like this. So has a man who's been called the James Joyce of the police novel, Jerome Charyn.

Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937. By the time he entered Columbia University, he had stuffed his head with comics and movies. Charyn taught at major American universities before teaching film at the American University of Paris, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Not only is Charyn an award-winning novelist, he is a tournament table tennis player. After hanging out with his brother, an NYPD homicide detective, Charyn wrote a dazzlingly inventive 10-book crime fiction series set in New York City that has achieved a cult-like status. The series features Isaac Sidel, a Jewish NYPD captain who becomes the city's deputy police commissioner and mayor. It's difficult to describe the books in this surreal series; they really must be experienced, beginning with the first book, written in 1974, Blue Eyes.

Manfred "Shotgun" Coen is the blond, blue-eyed man of the book's title. The son of a Bronx egg shop owner, he was orphaned when his parents stuck their heads in the oven. He's now a divorced homicide detective who lives in NYC, rather than on Long Island like his fellow cops. He loves playing ping pong in his undershorts and gun holster, spicy Cuban food, and magenta socks. (Man, I can't tell you how strange it seems to distill Charyn's jazz score of words into straightforward sentences like this.)

Coen was taken up after his police academy graduation by the police commissioner's whip, Deputy Chief Inspector Isaac Sidel. When gambling charges send Sidel into disgrace, Coen is assigned to find the missing Caroline Child, teenage daughter of a prominent theatrical producer. His assignment dumps him into a battle between Sidel and the Guzmann crime family, who moved their operations from Peru to the Bronx because Papa Guzmann "didn't trust mechanical things," including handguns. Once in the Bronx, Papa opened a candy store where his numbers runners and pickup men busy themselves in the back, while, in the front, Papa dishes up ice cream to tribes of cross-eyed girls "who thumped the stools and wailed with pleasure when Papa brought over a big jar of maraschino cherries." Perhaps Papa's son César, once Coen's closest boyhood friend and now a gambler and whorehouse kingpin, kidnapped Caroline, and she's at work as a prostitute in Peru.

Coen is a good man whose investigation delves into morally ambiguous or immoral places inhabited by weird characters who will make your head spin. Here's a sample: Coen's favorite stool pigeon is Arnold, a club-footed Puerto Rican whose dream is to visit The Dwarf, a notorious lesbian bar frequented by Caroline Child's cousin Odette, a gorgeous pornography queen employed by César Guzmann. Odette has an obsessed bantam-sized fan named Chino Reyes. Reyes is a taxi bandit who steals Arnold's special shoe to wear himself and would like to kill Coen for touching his face.

Watching these bizarre characters interact is a unique experience in crime fiction. It requires a reader to sit back and relax while being pelted with confusing argot, characters' multiple nicknames, and mystifying behavior. Reading Charyn is a bit like distance running: pretty soon you hit "the wall," and then it's wonderfully peaceful floating. I assure you, without special effort, you've learned the slang. Characters' identities have become clear. Their behavior is still crazy, but you can follow it. The plot frolics madly along, and your brain is dancing to its rhythm. If you're looking for a different reading experience that stretches your mind into pretzels, Charyn is definitely your guy.

Now, all 10 Isaac Sidel novels are being re-released as e-books and on-demand by Open Road and Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press:

In addition, Blue Eyes is in development as an adult animated series by HBO/Canal+. Take a look here at the concept pictures:

http://tropicaltoxic.blogspot.com/2010/12/hard-apple-in-development.html

For the animated series Hard Apple, based on the Isaac Sidel books

If you're lucky enough to speak French, you can read Charyn's graphic novel for the second book in the series, Marilyn the Wild. Here's an article (in French) that gives you a peek at the graphics:

http://www.actuabd.com/Jerome-Charyn-Quand-je-suis-romancier-je-suis-a-la-fois-le-scenariste-et-le-dessinateur

Marylin la dingue de Jerome Charyn et Frédéric Rébéna
Ed. Denoël Graphic

Grit Under Your Fingernails in New York City

Labor Day has walked away. You need to brush beach sand off your pants and get serious. You sit down at the kitchen table to balance your checkbook, no, c'mon, I said "serious," not "hopeless." You dig in the frig. Armed with something cold and wet, you shoot a glance at the clock. Good. You've got several hours to kill. This is no time for something romantic or soothing. Today, you want to chew some bullets. You head to the sofa with one of the hard-edged babies mentioned below:

Over the course of Lawrence Block's outstanding Matt Scudder series, the ex-cop/unlicensed private eye drags you into one neighborhood bar after another before he bottoms out and sobers up. Then he stays sober with the help of AA, and the books become less dark. You don't need to begin with the first, The Sins of the Fathers, in which Cale Hanniford asks Scudder to look into his daughter's death; instead, you can start with Eight Million Ways to Die (a prostitute finds big trouble when she wants to quit her profession) or the particularly fine When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (Scudder looks back to the 1970s when he was drinking heavily and juggling several investigations for friends). A couple of other good entries in the first half of the series are A Ticket to the Boneyard (a serial killer goes to work on a list) and A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (the rape and murder of a TV producer's wife lead to a Scudder investigation in this excellent but disturbing book). After you've read a few, you might want to read them all. The utilization of New York's underbelly setting, plotting, and cast of characters are first rate.

Lush Life by Richard Price is set in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It involves an investigation by an Irish cop and a Dominican female detective into the killing of young Ike Marcus, an unsuccessful actor/café manager, after a night of bar hopping with a couple of friends. Price's dialogue is really something, fresh off the streets. The plot sprawls, but that's okay because it's much more than a police investigation. It's also a look at how Ike's murder affects everyone: the victim's father and friends, the cops who investigate it, and the neighborhood itself. Price grew up in a Bronx housing project and knows New York's neighborhoods well. If you haven't read anything by Price, whose screenplays include Sea of Love and The Color of Money, give him a shot. His riveting book Clockers deals with the crack trade in a fictional city in New Jersey and is also worth a read.

Jerome Charyn wrote an inventive 10-book series featuring Isaac Sidel, an NYPD captain who later becomes deputy police commissioner and the city's mayor. I started reading these books after a guy whose reading tastes I like described them as "very hip, off the wall, and full of jazz-like riffs of words." They won't appeal to everyone; in addition to its surreal quality, the writing almost explodes off the page with vitality. Adult language and sexual content from the git-go. A lot of slang; Charyn likes words. They should be read in order. (You do know about Stop, You're Killing Me! don't you? You can find series order there.) Start with Blue Eyes, the first book in the Isaac Quartet, in which NYPD Detective Manfred Cohen butts heads with his mentor, Deputy Chief Inspector Sidel. In the second, Marilyn the Wild, Charyn examines what led to the events in Blue Eyes.

Jim Fusilli, a Wall Street Journal rock and pop music critic, writes an excellent neo-noir series about a man named Terry Orr, whose life is upended when his wife and son are murdered. Orr obtains his private eye license in order to track down their killer, but he takes other cases, too. In contrast to the violence of this series is the loving relationship Orr has with his daughter Bella. Fusilli captures the music and art scene of modern Manhattan extremely well. Vivid writing, good characterization and plotting. Like Charyn's books, these should be read in order. The debut is Closing Time.

Kathleen Mallory is a girl living on the streets when she comes to the attention of cop Louis Markowitz, who becomes her adoptive father. Mallory grows up to be a computer whiz and joins the NYPD. Her crime-solving methods are unconventional; Mallory has much in common with the criminals she chases. This series by Carol O'Connell opens with the death of Markowitz in Mallory's Oracle. In the next several books, more about Mallory's background is slowly revealed, and they should be read in order for that reason. This is a skillfully written and powerful series with an unusual and fascinating protagonist.

I still haven't recovered from Charlie Huston's The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. That book, full of nasty and weird people and revolting yet funny scenes, is an excellent read if you're not easily grossed out or offended. It's not set in New York. But Huston's series featuring an alcoholic ex-baseball player named Henry Thompson, who now tends bar, is set in Manhattan. Huston (no relation to John Huston) is a screenwriter who knows how to plot and write dialogue. His Thompson books (Caught Stealing is the first; if you're an animal lover, you might want to skim the cat-torture scene like I did) are irreverent, full of black humor, and very gritty neo-noir.

Parker is a coldly logical master thief working in New York City in a dark series by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark. It's difficult to create a violent, amoral character a reader would dread meeting and yet make that reader root for him; however, Stark manages this very well. The plotting is absolutely terrific. The best way to read these is the first three (The Hunter, later filmed as Point Blank with Lee Marvin; The Man with the Getaway Face; and The Outfit), and then you can skip around. (Be sure to check Stop, You're Killing Me! because some of the Parker books were also published under other titles.) Butcher's Moon, published in 1974, serves as somewhat of a finale in that characters from the preceding 15 books team up with the relentless Parker to retrieve heist money he lost in Slayground. Plots from previous books are mentioned, so be aware you'll read some spoilers. Don't miss Butcher's Moon, though, because it's a great read. Parker returns in 1997's Comeback, another excellent book. If you're only familiar with Westlake's comic caper series featuring Dortmunder, an inept burglar, you'll recognize this writer's amazing versatility after reading his Parker books.

Chester Himes (1909-1984) was imprisoned for armed robbery, and while in the joint he read Dashiell Hammett. In the 1950s, he moved to Paris, where he was appreciated more than he was in the United States. Himes wrote a stunningly original, dramatic, and violent series starring Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two ornery black NYPD detectives in Harlem. The books are full of gallows humor and warmth. Harlem leaps from the pages. Start with the 1958 French Grand Prix de Littérature Policère-winning A Rage in Harlem (originally published as For Love of Imabelle), in which a naive man named Jackson becomes involved with con men and counterfeiting. Some others: The Real Cool Killers (Coffin Ed's daughter steps into this supposedly open-and-shut case), All Shot Up (a heist involving a furious car chase in a storm and crooks dressed as cops), The Big Gold Dream (Alberta Wright dies at a revival meeting, and Coffin Ed and Grave Digger join the scramble to find her money), and Cotton Comes to Harlem (a scam involving a bogus preacher and a back-to-Africa movement demands investigation; the 1965 book was later made into a movie). Be warned, these books are not a sedate walk with a butler to the conservatory where you trip over a well-mannered corpse, but a wild and crazy ride with two hard-nosed cops through the streets and back alleys of Harlem.

The books above are some suggestions for obliterating end-of-summer drowsiness and preparing you for the specific rigors of fall: doing homework, raking leaves, watching football, or making a Halloween costume. Then, too, lolling on the sofa, reading about sleuths pounding NYC sidewalks while buses belch and taxis squeal around corners, is very satisfying. One can't leap immediately from summer relaxation into fall's tend-to-business mode, you know.

I'm sure you have some ideas about gritty books set in New York (Mickey Spillane, anyone?), and I'd love to hear them. At some other time, I'll talk about noir or Ed McBain's superb 87th Precinct books set in fictional Isola, New York, but right now I need another cold one.