Jerome Charyn: Eisenhower, my Eisenhower (USA 1971)

From the Publisher:
This original, violent, comic, and outrageous novel blends yesterday, today, and tomorrow into an explosive account of the terror of our urban scene, and, as the title suggests, evokes the innocence and experience, the sense of nostalgia and loss, and the search for a god-like figure at the heart of contemporary American life.

The central characters are "gypsies," "the children of Azaz," worshipers of the god Karooku, a minority who consider everyone else -- WASPS, Jews, and blacks alike -- "Anglos." They have their own language and ritual, their own Uncle Toms, their own Panther-like organization. Out of a welter of materials from our culture -- including a bizarre, funny array of nostalgic junk from the movies, sports, school, the military -- Jerome Charyn constructs a world that reflects our own as through a distorting mirror.

Toby Malothioon, a former war hero (in a Vietnam-like intervention), moves from failed attempts at a conventional life toward and into participation in urban guerrilla warfare. And in a parody of Middle America's fears and fantasies, he and his fellow gypsies engage in every possible kind of political and sexual connection.

A generation of novelists has been plagued by the difficulty of writing about a society that seems to outdo their wildest satiric inventions. In EISENHOWER, MY EISENHOWER, Jerome Charyn has found a remarkably effective solution to this problem by combining the experimental techniques of writers like Borges and Nabokov with the first-hand knowledge of Americana available to him as one of the most talented of our novelists.

Jerome Charyn: Eisenhower, my Eisenhower. A Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1971, SBN: 03-085055-X, 178 p., $5.95.