Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

Overview

"A moving attempt to trace the connections between Kosinski's wartime struggles and postwar fictions." —New Yorker

"Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that's still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it. . . . [He] show[s] that all forms of power are pretty much alike, or at least connected—Hollywood, Capitol Hill, Kensington Palace, the Kremlin. Because Kosinski is a figure who proves (if we still need to learn it) that the craziness of American life may have more in common with the craziness of Russia and Europe than we like to think." —New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works.

Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators—a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin's daughter—who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski's personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity.

Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942658146
Publisher:	Bellevue Literary Press
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His Times; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that's still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it. His prose has some of the rapid-fire but carefully controlled energy of Thomas Pynchon's early novella The Crying of Lot 49. Part of Charyn's point is to make the real and the imagined sound equally implausible. You find yourself looking up some of the characters, some of the episodes, online: Can this be true? It isn't always easy to tell. Charyn's other point seems much broader: to show that all forms of power are pretty much alike, or at least connected—Hollywood, Capitol Hill, Kensington Palace, the Kremlin. Because Kosinski is a figure who proves (if we still need to learn it) that the craziness of American life may have more in common with the craziness of Russia and Europe than we like to think.

The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Markovits

01/23/2017
Charyn (The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson) peels back the layers of myth and artifice built up by chameleon-like Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird and Being There. A World War II survivor and international icon, Kosinski was a celebrated and controversial writer who rose to prominence in the 1960s only to crumble under the weight of his lies and accusations of plagiarism. To unravel Kosinski’s story, Charyn begins at the end and works his way backward through Kosinski’s life. He uses four main characters—an assistant to Peter Sellers, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, an alcoholic socialite, and eventually Kosinski himself—to highlight the many ways Kosinski reinvented himself in order to climb the social ladder throughout his life. The narrative is passed from person to person like a relay race, with Kosinski always on the periphery of another, larger story being told. Charyn’s clever novel underscores the sense that Kosinski was a man impossible to nail down, given to wild changes in personality and appearance depending on his own wealth, desires, and mood. Through triangulating voices and stories, Charyn manages to get close to the truth, and does so with beautiful, spare prose. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Jerzy: A Novel

New York Times "Editors' Choice" selection

Literary Hub"Indie Press Book We're Looking Forward To" selection

Big Other "Most Anticipated Small Press Book" selection

"A moving attempt to trace the connections between Kosinski's wartime struggles and postwar fictions." —New Yorker

"Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that's still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it. . . . [He] show[s] that all forms of power are pretty much alike, or at least connected—Hollywood, Capitol Hill, Kensington Palace, the Kremlin. Because Kosinski is a figure who proves (if we still need to learn it) that the craziness of American life may have more in common with the craziness of Russia and Europe than we like to think." —New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

"A stark, engrossing novel about the rise and fall of celebrated author Jerzy Kozinski whose life was deeply affected by World War II, the Holocaust, the Soviet Union, literary awards, fame and by the film, Being There, that he wrote and that starred Peter Sellers." —Stay Thirsty Magazine

"Daringly imaginative and profoundly insightful." —Booklist (starred review)

"The rise and fall of novelist Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) emerges in an offbeat way . . . through Charyn's resourceful imagination and always-colorful, punchy, provocative prose." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Charyn peels back the layers of myth and artifice built up by chameleon-like Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski. . . . [His] clever novel underscores the sense that Kosinski was a man impossible to nail down, given to wild changes in personality and appearance depending on his own wealth, desires, and mood. Through triangulating voices and stories, Charyn manages to get close to the truth, and does so with beautiful, spare prose." —Publishers Weekly

Select Praise for Jerome Charyn

"Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature." —Michael Chabon

"One of our finest writers. . . . Whatever milieu [Charyn] chooses to inhabit, . . . his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable." —Jonathan Lethem

"Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible." —Tom Bissell

"Among Charyn's writerly gifts is a dazzling energy—a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain.. . . . [He is] an exuberant chronicler of the mythos of American life." —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

"One of our most intriguing fiction writers." —O, The Oprah Magazine

"Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons." —New Yorker

"Both a serious writer and an immensely approachable one, always witty and readable and . . . interesting." —Washington Post

"Absolutely unique among American writers." —Los Angeles Times

"A contemporary American Balzac." —Newsday

From the Publisher

★ 2016-12-15
The rise and fall of novelist Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) emerges in an offbeat way through real and imagined figures in his life.The narrative moves fitfully through Kosinski's life in five chapters that almost reluctantly form a mosaic of the whole man. The long opening section, the most charming of the quintet, touches on the entire span and the main characters that will follow. But it's dominated by Peter Sellers and narrated by the actor's driver as they seek an audience with Stan Laurel, dally with Lord Snowden and Princess Margaret, and then, for six years, pursue Kosinski's blessing to let Sellers play the character Chance in the movie version of Being There. Charyn (A Loaded Gun, 2016, etc.) gives a chapter to Stalin's daughter, who in fact lived next door to Kosinski in Princeton, looks into his strange marriage to an alcoholic heiress (her late husband changed here to the fictional Petroleum Jelly King), and revels in a dominatrix calling herself Anna Karenina who helps Kosinski, a patron of sex clubs, find the ideal editor. For a time, Kosinski was a darling of New York society, famed for colorful tales of his boyhood in wartime Poland—a period covered in the last chapter—and a serious artist, winning the 1969 National Book Award for Steps. Then came the 1982 Village Voice article that exposed his poor English skills and total reliance on the rewriting of secret editors. Charyn refers to the problem often—often enough to raise the question of how much schadenfreude is operating here. Kosinki's is a sad tale; he was a gifted raconteur except on the page in his chosen language, a flaw all the more obvious when conveyed through Charyn's resourceful imagination and always-colorful, punchy, provocative prose.

Kirkus Reviews