Jerzy

January 23, 2017
Charyn (The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson) peels back the layers of myth and artifice built up by chameleon-like Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird and Being There. A World War II survivor and international icon, Kosinski was a celebrated and controversial writer who rose to prominence in the 1960s only to crumble under the weight of his lies and accusations of plagiarism. To unravel Kosinski’s story, Charyn begins at the end and works his way backward through Kosinski’s life. He uses four main characters—an assistant to Peter Sellers, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, an alcoholic socialite, and eventually Kosinski himself—to highlight the many ways Kosinski reinvented himself in order to climb the social ladder throughout his life. The narrative is passed from person to person like a relay race, with Kosinski always on the periphery of another, larger story being told. Charyn’s clever novel underscores the sense that Kosinski was a man impossible to nail down, given to wild changes in personality and appearance depending on his own wealth, desires, and mood. Through triangulating voices and stories, Charyn manages to get close to the truth, and does so with beautiful, spare prose.

Starred review from January 1, 2017
The rise and fall of novelist Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) emerges in an offbeat way through real and imagined figures in his life.The narrative moves fitfully through Kosinski's life in five chapters that almost reluctantly form a mosaic of the whole man. The long opening section, the most charming of the quintet, touches on the entire span and the main characters that will follow. But it's dominated by Peter Sellers and narrated by the actor's driver as they seek an audience with Stan Laurel, dally with Lord Snowden and Princess Margaret, and then, for six years, pursue Kosinski's blessing to let Sellers play the character Chance in the movie version of Being There. Charyn (A Loaded Gun, 2016, etc.) gives a chapter to Stalin's daughter, who in fact lived next door to Kosinski in Princeton, looks into his strange marriage to an alcoholic heiress (her late husband changed here to the fictional Petroleum Jelly King), and revels in a dominatrix calling herself Anna Karenina who helps Kosinski, a patron of sex clubs, find the ideal editor. For a time, Kosinski was a darling of New York society, famed for colorful tales of his boyhood in wartime Poland--a period covered in the last chapter--and a serious artist, winning the 1969 National Book Award for Steps. Then came the 1982 Village Voice article that exposed his poor English skills and total reliance on the rewriting of secret editors. Charyn refers to the problem often--often enough to raise the question of how much schadenfreude is operating here. Kosinki's is a sad tale; he was a gifted raconteur except on the page in his chosen language, a flaw all the more obvious when conveyed through Charyn's resourceful imagination and always-colorful, punchy, provocative prose.

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Starred review from February 1, 2017
Versatile and inventive Charyn continues his audacious fictionalization of writers' lives, following The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010) with an erotically charged take on Jerzy Kosinski. Hailed as a brilliant Polish WWII refugee for his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), Kosinski became a high-profile celebrity who was subsequently accused of plagiarism, a charge left unresolved when he committed suicide at age 57 in 1991. Charyn seeks to fathom the mysteries of this enigma of many masks, myths, and disconcerting powers in a novel that jump-cuts back in time as various unreliable narrators recount provocative experiences with this literary chimera. There's Ian, factotum for Peter Sellers who will sell both their souls to play the leading role in the film version of Kosinski's Being There (1971); famous defector Svetlana, Stalin's daughter; Jerzy's wealthy ex-wife; a lesbian dominatrix; and a sexy ghostwriter. Jerzy emerges as a hawk-like, sinister, and lustful sorcerer and pathological liar. As Charyn, deeply versed in Kosinski's worlds, reaches back to young Jerzy's mastering of the art of lying to survive the war, he ultimately portrays a traumatized, desperately masquerading artist caught between languages, identities, and cultures, and between renown and scandal. Daringly imaginative and profoundly insightful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)