*Starred Review* Versatile and puckish Charyn extends his rascally improvisations on American history, following the Revolutionary War–era Johnny One-Eye (2008) with an audacious take on the life and spirit of Emily Dickinson. In his author’s note, Charyn explains his fascination with the poet and, most importantly, her “fiercely imagined life.” In a voice as precise and unnerving as that of her revolutionary poems, Dickinson narrates with droll wit, bemused rhapsody, and acid fury, often mockingly describing her redheaded self as a bird, mouse, kangaroo, spinster, “Uncle Emily,” and the Queen Recluse. Now and then, she alludes to the inner lightning strikes that prompt her to write, but flinty Dickinson focuses most on her knotty relationship with her father, her adoration for her dog, infatuation with her volcanic sister-in-law, and abiding, impossible love for Tom, the tattooed handyman turned thief. Bawdy, intrepid, and passionate, Dickinson ponders the shackles of women’s lives and class prejudice as she shares her surprisingly wild adventures. In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination, liberating Dickinson from the prim and proper cameo image of a repressed lady in white, and revealing just how free she truly was. --Donna Seaman
Review
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.
- Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books
Charyn tells the truth, but tells it slant . . . He has re-created her wild mind in all its erudition, playfulness and nervous energy.
--Ron Charles in The Washington Post
In Jerome Charyn's cleverly irreverent novel . . . Emily sneaks out of
her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, on clandestine missions,
and falls in love with men she cannot have.
--The Daily Beast
In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet . . . liberating Dickinson from the prim and proper cameo image of a repressed lady in white, and revealing just how free she truly was. --Booklist
Charyn excels most at drawing from Dickinson's rich poetic legacy to trace the ebb and flow of her life . . . compelling portrait of Emily Dickinson as an intelligent young woman writing on scraps of paper.
--Paula L. Woods in Los Angeles Times
From the Author
She was the first poet I had ever read, and I was hooked and hypnotized from the start. It was the old maid of Amherst who lent me a little of her own courage to risk becoming a writer.
We had so little in common. She was a country girl, and I was a boy from the Bronx. She had a lineage with powerful roots in America, and I was a mongrel whose heritage was like an unsolved riddle out of Eastern Europe.
Yet I could hear the tick of her music in my wakefulness and in my sleep. Suddenly that plain little woman with her bolts of red hair was as familiar to me as the little scars on my face.
"The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" will be told entirely in Emily's voice, with all its modulations and tropes - tropes I learned from her letters, wherein she wears a hundred masks, playing wounded lover, penitent, and female devil as she delights and disturbs us, just as I hope my Emily will both delight and disturb the reader and take her roaring music right into the twenty-first century.
From the Inside Flap
"There's nothing quite like a Charyn novel. . . . His sentences make a mournful and sensational clatter, like a bundle of butcher knives dropped on a cathedral floor." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
Jerome Charyn has been writing some of the most bold and adventurous American fiction for over forty years. His ten-book cycle of novels about madcap New York mayor and police commissioner Isaac Sidel inspired a new generation of younger writers in America and France, where he is a national literary icon. Now, adding to his already distinguished career, Charyn gives us The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an audacious novel about the inner imaginative world of America's greatest poet. Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn has removed the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, inner turmoil, and powerful sexuality.
The story begins in the snow. It's 1848, and Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules. She sees the seminary's blond handyman rescue a baby deer from a mountain of snow, in a lyrical act of liberation that will remain with her for the rest of her life. The novel revivifies such historical figures as Emily's brother, Austin, with his crown of red hair; her sister-in-law, Sue; a rival and very best friend, Emily's little sister, Lavinia, with her vicious army of cats; and especially her father, Edward Dickinson, a controlling congressman.
Charyn effortlessly blends these very factual characters with a few fictional ones, creating a dramatis personae of dynamic breadth. Inspired by her letters and poetry, Charyn has captured the occasionally comic, always fevered, ultimately tragic story of Dickinson's journey from Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse, compulsively scribbling lines of genius in her Amherst bedroom. Rarely before has the nineteenth-century world of New England--its religious stranglehold, its barbaric insane asylums, its circus carnivals--been captured in such spectacular depth. Through its lyrical inflections and poetic rhythms, its invention of a distinct, twenty-first-century "Charynesque" language that pays remarkable homage to America's sovereign literary past, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson provides a resonance of such power as to make this an indelible work of literature in its own right.
From the Back Cover
“Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.” ―Michael Chabon
An astonishing novel that reveals the passions, humor, and heartbreak of America’s greatest poet.
“The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is astonishing. Charyn gives Emily Dickinson a new life, and one with a rush of energy and power. I shall never see her or her poetry in the same way again.” ―Frederic Tuten, author of Adventures of Mao on the Long March
“I never heard Emily Dickinson’s voice, but Jerome Charyn’s novel convinces me that this is the nineteenth-century genius woman poet, actually telling her story. . . . A tour de force by a major American novelist.” ―Herbert Gold, author of Still Alive: A Temporary Condition
“In his breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism, Jerome Charyn pulls off the nearly impossible: in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson he imagines an Emily Dickinson of mischievousness, brilliance, desire, and wit (all which she possessed) and then boldly sets her amid a throng of historical, fictional, and surprising characters just as hard to forget as she is. This is a bold book, but we’d expect no less of this amazing novelist.” ―Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
“Jerome Charyn is merely one of our finest writers, with a polymorphous imagination and crack comic timing. Whatever milieu he chooses to inhabit, his characters sizzle with life and his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” ―Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude
“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, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg
“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.”―The New Yorker
“Deserves to be spoken about in the same breath as E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.” ―Publishers Weekly, about Johnny One-Eye
About the Author
“One of the most important writers in American literature” (Michael Chabon), Jerome Charyn is the award-winning author of more than fifty works, including The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. A renowned scholar of twentieth-century Hollywood, he lives in Manhattan.
