Jerome Charyn: Going to Jerusalem (USA 1971)

From the Publisher:
A funny-sad novel about a voyage across the nightmarish landscape of contemporary America. The travelers: a six-year-old wizard, his nympho-maniacal mother, their thirty-one-year-old epileptic protector, and anaging ex-Nazi world chess champion on his final tour.

"The writing has extraordinary vigor and dash and the imaginative play ystrikes me as inexhaustible. For sheer inventiveness and for a positive excess of the comic grotesque, few contemporary novels can match it." -- Mark Schorer

"Full of comic invention, bizarre characters, flashes of insight, soulful touches." -- New Statesman

"A special kind of twentieth-century whimsy -- wistfully fey, in graceful but hard-pressed retreat before history's current brutalities... Black humor played with white chessmen -- a dark game but not without a lyrical upbeat. Melvin Maddocks, Christian Science Monitor

Jerome Charyn: Going to Jerusalem. A Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, 180 p., $2.45.