"Under the Eye of God"

Jerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. 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."

Charyn applied the Page 69 Test to his novel Under the Eye of God and reported the following:

This is a perfect entry point into the book. It’s a mirror within a mirror inside another mirror.

Trudy Winckleman, the owner of a bordello in New Orleans, suddenly finds herself in Manhattan impersonating a dead woman, Inez, for the titillation of a multi-millionaire, David Pearl. But something goes awry. She falls in love with one of her own marks, Isaac Sidel, the vice-president-elect of the United States, and she doesn’t really know what to do about it.

In this page [at left, click to enlarge], Trudy, aka Inez, tries to explain to David Pearl that she can no longer live inside his fantastic mirror.

Inez, once a Ziegfeld Follies girl and the mistress of Manhattan’s king of crime, the late Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the World Series of 1919, seems to get constantly in the way of Trudy, David Pearl and Isaac Sidel.

Trudy no longer wants to live in this strange museum on the Upper West Side that David has created for the specter of Inez. But Trudy has two children, and both of them will be in jeopardy if she runs away from David’s “mausoleum.”

So she has to depend on Isaac Sidel, someone who has even less of a future than she has.

Learn more about the book and author at Jerome Charyn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue