Jerome Charyn and BACK TO BATAAN

Author Michael Chabon (The Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) has called him, "one of the most important writers in American Literature."  Newsday has hailed him as "a contemporary American Balzac."  And the LA Times has described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."

Who is he? He's Jerome Charyn, an incredibly prolific, award-winning author who writes across genres and has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels...so far.

His latest undertaking is a novel of historical fiction, BACK TO BATAAN, an eBook (re-issued by Tribute Books) for middle grade readers (Grades 7-9): It's 1943 in New York City. Eleven year-old Jack Dalton is depressed and restless following the death of his father at Bataan (in the Philippines) during World War II.  Jack's mother is trying to keep body and soul together by working in a parachute factory and Jack, tossed aside by his girlfriend and left to his own devices, wants to enlist in the army.  When Jack finally runs away, he falls in with a gang of criminals.  This compact YA novel is filled with action, adventure and suspense.  To learn more, link HERE

Jerome Charyn was kind enough to chat about the book and share some of his ideas about the craft of writing.

Kathleen Gerard:  Thanks for joining us, Jerome.  You write across a realm of different genres, what excites you about connecting with different audiences? 

Jerome Charyn:  I’m not so sure that these are different audiences, I think we all love stories, whether we’re children or great-grandfathers and when you move from genre to genre you are still telling a story like Scheherazade and the king is always waiting for the next tale.

KG:  BACK TO BATAAN is a reissue of a print book, now being offered for the first time as an eBook.  Being a published author for nearly 50 years, what's your impression of digital books? 

JC: I think that this is a kind of logical step as we move from the internet into eBooks. Publishing is changing even as we speak. I think there now will be a more complicated dance between the eBook and the printed book, and as we’ve seen recently, successes in eBooks allow the author to move into print.

KG:  How much of your own life is embroiled in BACK TO BATAAN? Did you personally experience New York during World War II?
JC:  I think so much of the source of my writing comes from my childhood, I grew up during the War - so many of the terrors and the magic of certain films have remained with me.  And all of this appears in the character of Jack.

KG:  In reading the story behind this book, I understand that your brother was a detective. Did your experiences with him influence the plot of BACK TO BATAAN?

JC:  Not really, I think all writing is crime writing. And Back to Bataan is a crime novel with a very original twist.

KG:  In the book, why did you decide to include a fascination with famous people - Gary Cooper, Eleanor Roosevelt, etc. - as an underurrent?

JC:  These people were heroes to me as a child, particularly Eleanor Roosevelt, who was one of the most extraordinary women who ever lived, and of course as a child I fell in love with Gary Cooper’s face and with his very slow drawl, that seemed so exotic to me.

KG:  Jack, the main character of the novel, finds acclaim through his writing, yet he feels guilty for exploiting the lives of other people on the page. How does a writer bridge this gap?

JC:  You’re always cannibalizing other people and writers when you start to write, so it’s natural that Jack should be a young cannibal.

KG:  The New York Times plays a significant role in this novel. How important is New York Times in your own life and is there any special reason why you decided to make it a form of connection in the life of Jack, the main character?
JC:  As a child, I didn’t even know that the Times existed – I grew up in a neighborhood without newspapers and books, so that when I first fell upon the New York Times, I was very very greedy, and wanted to include it in Jack’s middle-class life.

KG:  Your writing is so precise, yet evocative - how do you work at crafting your unique style of prose?
JC:  Everything begins and ends with the word, with the music of the sentence and as Tolstoy once said, “I’m always composing.”

KG: What are your thoughts on the recent explosion and popularity of the YA genre?

JC: I think it might very well be that it started with Harry Potter, that young adult writers are trying to tell good stories and adults have moved into that kind of dream.

KG:  What advice would you give to young people who aspire to a literary career?

JC: It’s not worth the money – only write if you’re absolutely in love with it.

Well, there you have it, thoughts from Jerome Charyn, an acclaimed, dedicated writer who has made significant contributions to the literary community.  Reading Between the Lines thanks him for visiting and wishes him much continued success!  

Back to Bataan by Jerome Charyn
Tribute Books, $2.99, eBook, ASIN #B008DYK6C2, 101 pp
Publication Date: June 21, 2012
To order this book via AMAZON link HERE

Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil

From the prologue of The Long Vigil, author Jerome Charyn does not mince words, thoughts or ideas about Joe DiMaggio, The Yankee Great, versus Joe DiMaggio, a man with glaring foibles, weaknesses and crippling limitations. Having been witness to the Yankee Clipper in action when he played in Yankee Stadium, the writing is rich with Charyn's passion and enthusiasm for the game, its history and his own personal intrigue over the larger than life mystique of "The Jolter," as he calls him. But for all of Charyn's adulation of DiMaggio's dignified and elegant baseball prowess, he deems DiMaggio, the person, a "savant" - a man insecure in managing life off the baseball diamond and grossly inept in maintaining interpersonal relationships.

Charyn divides the book into two parts. Part One, "The Player," delves into the years DiMaggio spent as a New York Yankee, racking up accomplishments and setting records. However challenging and physically demanding, for those thirteen years it would seem that Joe DiMaggio felt most alive. In the second part of the book, "The Demon Lover," DiMaggio struggles with the perils of life after baseball, and the story shifts to DiMaggio's obsessive relationship with Marilyn Monroe, the great love of his life. The before and after of these two sections set up possible reasons why Joltin' Joe ultimately left the game and gradually disappeared inside himself and his mystique.

DiMaggio and Monroe were star-crossed lovers who were both private, shy and distrustful of the majority of people who populated their worlds. Charyn sets up a paradigm that shows how alike the two were - Monroe's self-worth came from the screen, DiMaggio's from the baseball field. Both were "fractured beauties," vulnerable and fragile creatures, who achieved great success, yet both were filled with anger and rage that were made manifest in different ways.

When Monroe would not give up her acting career to become the wife and mother DiMaggio wanted, their relationship soured. Monroe's rejection--and later, her tragic death--is the devastating blow from which DiMaggio never recovers. In Charyn's account, DiMaggio wanders through the next 37 years of his life, a broken misfit of a man - yet one who treasured Monroe's memory until he died.

After Monroe's death, money became the priority of DiMaggio's life. Some claimed that to Joe, baseball was "just a business" that fueled his need to keep making a profit off his name, via the greed and stinginess for which he became legendary. The author postulates (p. 75) that DiMaggio's focus on money was all about pride and his way to soothe his own "narrow world of perfection." DiMaggio always had a need to be heralded as "The Greatest Living Ballplayer," and he cultivated that legacy with the same fervor and intensity he gave to the game. The facts Charyn presents indicate that a quest for perfection is inherent in all phases and aspects of DiMaggio's life. And it would seem that the New York Yankees, which would come to define DiMaggio and give his life its sole sense of meaning and purpose, tapped into those roots of perfectionism before he ever took to the field at Yankee Stadium for the first time. 

Charyn paints a picture of New York City, post-Babe Ruth and pre-DiMaggio:  "There was an emptiness, a terrible void, that no one could fill." The author points up the proliferation of Italian-Americans crowding New York and most big-league cities at the time. From a business standpoint, the Yankees' franchise cleverly capitalized on those statistics to boost the appeal of DiMaggio and their fan base. A headline in The Sporting News even read, "Fans Expect Recruit From Coast to be Cobb, Ruth, Jackson In One." Imagine the pressure that placed on the rookie. If DiMaggio, by nature, was a perfectionist, then surely the expectations placed upon him (and even those he placed upon himself) only exacerbated his one-track focus, discipline and dedication to the art of the sport. It brought him the recognition he craved. However, did he ever really feel a sense of personal fulfillment?  Charyn's account suggests that DiMaggio's lack of dominance and control outside of baseball only served to heighten his personal insecurities, making the remainder of his life anti-climactic.

Charyn (The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson) once again succeeds as a thorough and thought-provoking writer. The Long Vigil presents the many facets of the price DiMaggio paid for his success and the sad, tragic burden there was in living the life of Joe DiMaggio - on and off the field.

NOTE:  In order to write this review, I received a copy of this book from Tribute Books.

Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil by Jerome Charyn
(Yale University Press, Hardcover, 9780300123289, 192pp.)
Publication Date: March 2011
To order this book via INDIEBOUND click HERE

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

I thought I'd read all there was to know about Emily Dickinson. But upon reading Jerome Charyn's historical, largely biographical novel, THE SECRET LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON, I considered her in a whole new light. Could the famous recluse of Amherst, an obsessively private woman, who secretly stashed 1700 poems that were discovered in a dresser drawer after her death, have had a passionate, wild side?

My view of Emily Dickinson has largely been one of a great poet whose work reflects a life spent railing against a God she could not understand, nor fully accept, and a religious faith that was imposed upon her. Charyn has whittled away that view and has instead emphasized a flesh and blood human being who shares more universal baseline dreams, obsessions and longings. Drawing characters from Emily Dickinson's real life (and interspersing some fictionalized characters), Charyn shatters the image of Emily Dickinson as a repressed, timid spinster and portrays her as a willful, rebellious woman with great desires and ultimately, great disappointments in love. At one point, she even wanders alone into a disreputable "rum resort" and boldly sits on the lap of a man who is void of all manners. Could this really be the same Emily Dickinson whom history has cast as a prim, passive-aggressive-type?

The plot evolves around the great loves in Emily's life - and this part of the story (the real and the imagined) is what entices the reader most. These loves include a host of male figures, including her father and even her beloved dog, Carlo. Her brother, sister, sister-in-law and even a fictionalized best girlfriend from school, Zilpah - who becomes Emily's nemesis - also figure prominently. Charyn has a full grasp on the artistic temperament of his protagonist, a woman who displays dramatic fervor and intense devotion to the people and aims of her life. However, the author leaves admirers of Dickinson's work to speculate how these great loves might have influenced her poetry.

The book is told in the first-person point-of-view of Emily, whose voice is forthright and, at times, wickedly insightful. Charyn intersperses italicized, omniscient narrative chapters to segue scenes and offer back story. The novel opens at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Emily, a reluctant 17 year-old student, is enthralled by Tom, the campus handyman (an illiterate pick-pocket), complete with a racy tattoo on his arm. When Tom becomes ill, Emily secretly goes to help him and their attraction solidifies. When the headmistress gets wind of this, she expels Emily, and Emily is forced to return home. By then, Emily is completely smitten with Tom, who continues to make cameos over the course of Emily's life and the trajectory of the story.

Once Emily returns to "The Homestead," her story becomes rather episodic, entrenched in the relationships Emily has with her controlling father, the rest of her family, and Zilpah, who comes to work as a housekeeper for the Dickinsons and wins the favor of Emily's father (in addition to Emily's resentment). Zilpah and her connection to Tom serve to keep continuity to the plot as a host of men (potential suitors) cross Emily's path - each with his own unique connection to Emily, and vice-versa.

THE SECRET LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON is a well-told tale as a novel unto itself.  It seems as though the author, in writing such a provocative story, has tried to imagine possible reasons why America's most alluring poetess lived such a mysterious, obscured life.

NOTE: This book was reviewed via an electronic ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) of the novel as provided by Tribute Books. 

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn
(W. W. Norton & Company, Paperback, 9780393339178, 352pp.)
Publication Date: February 2011
To purchase a copy of this book via INDIEBOUND click HERE