RAVAGE & SON

A bleak tale of murder, corruption, and antisemitism in pre–World War I Manhattan.

Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights has nothing on Charyn’s Lower East Side, described by one character as home to “every kind of vermin.” Abraham Cahan, muckraking editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, has no shortage of targets, including all-powerful real estate baron Lionel Ravage, “the fallen angel among Jewish aristocrats,” who mistreats and abuses immigrants in equal measure. Having spawned countless illegitimate children, Ravage has little to do with any of them, including his conflicted son Ben, whom Cahan takes under his wing and gets into Harvard Law School. Shrugging off his law degree, Ben becomes an investigator for the Kehilla, a neighborhood watch–type group funded by wealthy Jews. Their aim is to stop rampant assaults on young Jewish women, one of whom is pulled out of the East River “like a broken mermaid.” Ben will stop at nothing to find the culprit, including getting the stuffing kicked out of him. Painful revelations await. Stuffed, à la Ragtime, with real-life celebrities including Henry James (whose “sympathies didn't extend to the Jewish quarter” on Ellis Island), the novel doesn’t aways justify their presence. There are enjoyable touches of magic realism, including an enforcer whose threatening presence is announced by canaries flitting around his too-small derby, but descriptions and digressions can make for slow reading. A bold effort, but following Charyn's brilliant Sergeant Salinger (2021) and enjoyable Big Red (2022), a disappointment.

One of Charyn's less-rewarding forays into historical fiction.