Ravage & Son
A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century Manhattan
Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan's Lower East Side--the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century--in a dark mirror.
Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish "Mr. Hyde," a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.
A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.
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Select Praise for Jerome Charyn
"Jerome 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
"Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature." --Michael Chabon
"Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination." --William Giraldi
"[Charyn's] sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable." --Jonathan Lethem
"One of our most rewarding novelists." --Larry McMurtry
"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, New York Review of Books
"Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons." --New Yorker
"One of our most intriguing fiction writers." --O, The Oprah Magazine
"Absolutely unique among American writers." --Los Angeles Times
"A contemporary American Balzac." --Newsday
"Charyn's blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words." --Washington Post
"[Charyn] writes with the sort of whirlwind energy that turns the seediest story into a breakneck adventure." --Wall Street Journal
"Charyn has a gift for the unexpected, both linguistically and narratively. . . . The result is at once surprising and very entertaining." --BookPage
"For half a century, [Charyn] has been an unpredictable, unclassifiable, and above all exactingly smart author." --Open Letters Review
"Charyn makes artful use of historical fact and fiction's panache." --Kirkus Reviews
"Charyn, as he has proven time and time again, is a master of the written word." --Jewish Journal
"Wherever he takes us, Charyn's mind is always agile, and his prose is stunningly electric." --Jewish Book Council
