142
MAUREEN HOWARD
With the younger writers under discussion it seems patronizing
to
indulge in praise by association, to admire the voices they are imitating
(Nabokov, Pynchon, Singer - how often an element of fashion creeps
in!). Jerome Charyn's
Going To Jerusalem
adapts Nabokovian devices,
swings along with Pynchon-like ingenuity and remains, in spite of the
good scenes and good writing, completely anonymous. The hero, Ivan
Farkas, is an epileptic, just managing at the age of thirty-one to break
from his demonic father, a self-styled admiral who runs a military
academy in Brooklyn. The Academy with its tiny soldiers in outmoded
costumes is more grotesque and a lot less funny than Munchkinland, and
a good place to get out of. The pace is fast, picaresque, as Charyn sets
up each scene for the next encounter, but once in motion the novel
hardly ever pauses to engage us.
Under orders from the Admiral, Ivan goes on the road with a
six-year-old chess prodigy in pursuit of Kortzfleisch, an old German chess
champion in his decline. While the chase is obsessive and absurd, it
has none of the mystery and seductive terror of the hunt in
Lolita.
With
this donnee, what can be left to discover:
". .. Kortz. He's a dead man," says Ivan, "whatever he did he
can't harm anybody now. Not even with his chess playing....
Fifteen years ago he might have challenged Botvinnik or Spassy or
Tal and gotten away with it. They'd mate him in a moment today.
He's a ghost, Papa. You know it."
"I prefer my ghosts to have a little less flesh," the Admiral says
squinting. "Somehow I find it difficult to forget that Herr Kortz–
fleisch was Himmler's deputy. That he is responsible for the deaths
of crippled children and sick old men."
In one bad play the chess metaphor is undermined before the first
tournament. Charyn's problem is tha t he wants to construct fantasies;
but he depletes them with reality. As the prodigy's suitcase is being
packed, we are pretty much told what we'll find in the motels across
the country. "'Papa, I want to say, madness can't be localized. The
symptoms are too widespread.' "
The Admiral is chasing his own guilt, of course, in his pursuit of
Kortz. With the instincts of a Storm Trooper, he rejects the epileptic son
he had wanted to make a superman. He locks his wife in an asylum
and speaks of tainted blood: "'I married a harpy with a history of
half-wits and lunatics behind her.' '' There is a scene in the South
straight out of
The
Blacks
- Negro clowns in white masks taunt Ivan
who again refuses any guilt. Charyn's concerns are a lot more direct
than his modish style will allow, and I can't help feeling that he got
wound up in the inventions of a "brilliant comic novel" that would have
