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Darlin' Bill
Book by Jerome Charyn
- GenresHistorical Fiction
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
About the author
Jerome Charyn
224 books232 followersJerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With more than 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.
Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.
In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."
Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.
Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.
In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."
Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 3, 2014
If L. Frank Baum were writing books, for adults, in the latter instead of early half of the 20th century, his work would probably look a great deal like Jerome Charyn's.
That's just another thing I've learned about his work while reading one of Charyn's books. The other thing that became clear while reading Darlin' Bill is that his characters would have been curled up in fetal balls if they were in anyone else's books and experiencing even half of what he puts them through. Have you read Cormac McCarthy? Jerome Charyn is Cormac McCarthy with gumption. This was pretty clear, I suppose, from the first I'd read from Charyn, Johnny One-Eye, but there tend to be other distractions along the way.
The main character this time is a young woman who grows in Texas just prior to the Civil War, and as the years progress her life becomes intertwined with Wild Bill Hickok's. Charyn writes all of his stories in the manner of the dime novels that popularized Wild Bill, as wild adventures that mercilessly toss their characters together and apart as some primal upheaval is changing the world around them. This is a Western, but chances are good you've never read a Western like this one.
As he does with all the famous figures that crop up in his books (unlike, say, Thomas Pynchon other than in the pages of Mason & Dixon, they tend to be main or at least integral characters in the narrative), Charyn is hardly easy on Wild Bill, and neither is he disrespectful (the biggest challenge he's nailed in this tradition, that I've read, is his most recent book, I Am Abraham, which like The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is heavily foreshadowed by Darlin' Bill).
Mixed in for good measure I'll also reference Israel Potter, Melville's contribution to the kind of centuries-old storytelling Charyn has since single-handedly revived, and Tristram Shandy, which thank god Charyn echoes with much greater clarity (for one, no one is telling this story with a million tangents).
How does Baum fit in with all of this? His penchant for creating characters out of his characters. That's a knack Charyn consistently demonstrates, and which always helps energize his stories.
Although if you just want the chaos a famous gunslinger can provoke, there's that too. Long before The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Charyn with great precision explained why it became so easy to kill a legend.
That's just another thing I've learned about his work while reading one of Charyn's books. The other thing that became clear while reading Darlin' Bill is that his characters would have been curled up in fetal balls if they were in anyone else's books and experiencing even half of what he puts them through. Have you read Cormac McCarthy? Jerome Charyn is Cormac McCarthy with gumption. This was pretty clear, I suppose, from the first I'd read from Charyn, Johnny One-Eye, but there tend to be other distractions along the way.
The main character this time is a young woman who grows in Texas just prior to the Civil War, and as the years progress her life becomes intertwined with Wild Bill Hickok's. Charyn writes all of his stories in the manner of the dime novels that popularized Wild Bill, as wild adventures that mercilessly toss their characters together and apart as some primal upheaval is changing the world around them. This is a Western, but chances are good you've never read a Western like this one.
As he does with all the famous figures that crop up in his books (unlike, say, Thomas Pynchon other than in the pages of Mason & Dixon, they tend to be main or at least integral characters in the narrative), Charyn is hardly easy on Wild Bill, and neither is he disrespectful (the biggest challenge he's nailed in this tradition, that I've read, is his most recent book, I Am Abraham, which like The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is heavily foreshadowed by Darlin' Bill).
Mixed in for good measure I'll also reference Israel Potter, Melville's contribution to the kind of centuries-old storytelling Charyn has since single-handedly revived, and Tristram Shandy, which thank god Charyn echoes with much greater clarity (for one, no one is telling this story with a million tangents).
How does Baum fit in with all of this? His penchant for creating characters out of his characters. That's a knack Charyn consistently demonstrates, and which always helps energize his stories.
Although if you just want the chaos a famous gunslinger can provoke, there's that too. Long before The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Charyn with great precision explained why it became so easy to kill a legend.
November 14, 2011
Interesting and highly readable reworking of the ideas, themes and cliches of The Wild West. Its black humour and emphasis on the grimy and the unheroic aspects of this world, coupled with an examination of conscious myth-making, make it a precursor to Deadwood, among other cultural output.
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October 29, 2008W Cha
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews