Books We Can’t Quit: War Cries Over Avenue C, by Jerome Charyn

Originally Published by Donald Fine, 1985

Review by Morris Collins

In his biography of Isaac Babel, Jerome Charyn describes discovering Babel’s writing for the first time. “I read on and on. I found myself going back to the same stories—as if narratives were musical compositions that one could never tire of. Repetition increased their value. With each dip into Babel I discovered and rediscovered reading itself.” This description perfectly reflects my experience of encountering Charyn’s own mysterious novel, War Cries Over Avenue C. Reading it for the first time was an epiphanic experience: I had just finished college and decided that I was going to be a writer. This meant that I was taking a year off, doing manual labor, and writing everything I could: stories, novel fragments, poems. I had an inkling that I was decent with language but unschooled in form. I wanted to learn the rules—how did a story work? What was a novel supposed to do? Then I picked up Charyn’s novel—and found myself quickly beyond any literary world I recognized, beyond the terra firma of conventional plotting, form, or genre. It was a novel of linguistic bravado, narrative mayhem, and structural acrobatics—a beautiful and crazy book where the author never stopped to wink or nod at the reader. Unlike in Pynchon or Barthelme—two writers Charyn is often compared to—the absurdity felt desperate, essential, and real. You could tell Charyn believed absolutely in his vision.

War Cries Over Avenue C opens as a war novel, a chronicle of two lovers who separate and find each other again on the front lines of the Vietnam War, but from this fairly traditional point it explodes out in a lyric howl, a novel of war and espionage and love and drugs that reads like a chronicle from the dream side of the twentieth century. Here, from early in the novel is Uncle Albert, a Henry James scholar and American spymaster discussing the war: “It’s a clump of ideas too far out for the regular boys…We conduct a war that runs counter to the war that’s going on…We don’t stop at any border…We go anywhere to get what we want.” Ostensibly he is describing the CIA’s covert operations along the Cambodian border, but he could just as well be describing Charyn’s novel itself, a novel running parallel to, but perpetually separate from, conventional popular fiction, too far out in every direction, alive with language that, as Charyn describes Babel’s prose, “reverberates in every direction.”

Charyn’s language, like Babel’s, always surprises. It resembles an incantation: musical, repetitive, heavy with alliteration—a stream of unconsciousness where intimation and tonal resonance govern the movement between image and thought.  James Sallis has described the prose in War Cries as “language pushed almost to the level of hysteria…phrases or sentences eat up miles and chapters; more happens between paragraphs than in most others’ whole stories; entire scenes collapse, as though sucked into black holes, into a single image.” For this reason, Charyn’s prose does not lend itself to excerption.  Its logic comes from its cadence, and, taken outside of its larger rhythms, the transitions between paragraphs, if not sentences, can be hard to follow. War Cries is a novel of recursion.  Characters, themes, landscapes all have their doubles—events repeat and remint themselves in increasingly degraded iterations. Charyn’s sentences reinforce this hall-of-mirrors structure. At one point, describing a Montagnard king’s glee, Charyn writes, “He danced to Myriam’s bed, trembling like a king.” The simile here is tautological: the king trembles like a king. On its own, this sentence is nonsense, but read against the rest of the novel where Charyn’s recursive doubling problematizes notions of identity and authenticity, the sentence’s tautology reflects the book’s larger structure.

Here, very briefly, is what happens in War Cries Over Avenue C. Brace yourself: Sarah Fishman and Howie Biedersbill fall in love and become engaged in high school, but are separated by Sarah’s conservative Jewish father, a professional greeting card writer. They are reunited in Vietnam where Fishman, now known as Saigon Sarah, is a nurse in a rural CIA-run hospital-cum-interrogation center and Howie is a commando in a secret unit called the Blue Beanies who incite insurgency among Vietnam’s aboriginal tribes, while also, it seems, running drugs, blowing up juice bars, working concurrently with and against the KGB—and discussing a lot of Henry James in their down-time. On one of his missions, Howie, befriends a Montagnard chieftain called King George, who teaches him tribal poisoning skills. After the war Sarah and Howie return to New York’s Alphabet City and hide out in a Hebrew school where Sarah cares for Howie—now impotent like his idol, Henry James, shell-shocked, with a scalp full of shrapnel—and a misfit gang of kidnapped loners—a publisher who Howie drugs and paints as King George and who, in his new chemical fog, becomes a famous nude cabaret dancer; a nymphet on the run from her father; and a Russian heavy/ refusenik/ informer. Throw in a KGB double-agent, a spying literature professor, a French baroness, and a Russian Jewish fiddling prodigy turned baker and gangster whose uncle taught polar bears to dance for Stalin—and you’ve got about a hundred pages into the book.

If this all sounds hectic—it’s because it is. Charyn imbues his characters with longing, loss, and mania—they are traumatized, heartbroken, every one of them living in a diminished present that looks very much like the ruins of their past—but he sheers from them the traditional dimensions of motivating psychology. This lack of motivation in such an event-heavy plot creates a feeling of accretion rather than narrative progression, and indeed in Charyn’s novel, the relentless down-the-rabbit-hole escalation is what’s important.

Like The Odyssey, War Cries is a Romance whose fantastic elements literalize the experience of returning from war. In The Odyssey, though, the Lotus Eaters—without memory or desire—are antithetical to narrative; if Odysseus joins them the story ends. But for Charyn’s amnesiacs, the forgetting only gets worse when they make it home. It’s as if the world they’ve come back to is as strange and dangerous as the one they left—they’re sleepwalkers who bring their bad dreams with them. Howie notes, “It wasn’t Nam. It wasn’t even Nicaragua. It was Twenty-second Street.” But war’s traumas don’t end; they refashion themselves in the present and Charyn’s CIA professors, Russian operatives, and Montagnard magicians keep on fighting in the Lower East Side, even as the vets, stricken of memory and purpose, try to return to a life they know they had, but can’t really remember. For Charyn, amnesia is more than just war wound; it reflects an American culture bent on forgetting its past.

In Herbert Gold’s review of the novel, he notes that Charyn “seems to be indifferent to the nuances of psychology.”  Although Gold’s review is positive, other reviewers also criticize this lack of psychology as well as what they consider a “manic” and “haphazard” plot. We should remember that this novel, as well as many of his others, focuses most closely on the experience of European Jewish immigrants in America. As such, his style is in direct opposition to the Jewish-American writers who attempt to stave off the horrors of the historical by looking inward and making some sense of the personal and the psychological, who create a world where, as Bellow’s Augie March insists, a man’s character determines his fate. In such a world psychology matters and pain and trauma will be expressed, as they often are in Roth et al, as neuroses. Charyn, though, does not attempt to cobble the century into meaning: his style externalizes the insanity of the twentieth century, stares down a continent that could spawn a holocaust or a country that could throw nearly sixty-thousand lives at a meaningless war and then forget them.  War Cries strips away the rationalizations and fictions of American mythology and leaves only the madness. He approaches Jewish experience, immigrant experience, urban American experience like the family of Russian Jewish bakers in War Cries who “had come riding out of Moscow and Brighton Beach with their own vision of the new world.  They wouldn’t be trifled with.”

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Morris Collins’s first novel, Horse Latitudes (MP Publishing USA), came out this fall. Other fiction and poetry has recently appeared in Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Chattahoochee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Nimrod among others. He lives in Boston and teaches creative writing at College of the Holy Cross.