What do you think?
Rate this book
Captain Kidd
A portrait of World War II general George Patton is seen through the eyes of a member of his personal staff, Captain Roland Kahn, who walks the General's dog and runs a profitable scheme selling army supplies to underground customers
208 pages, Hardcover
First published June 12, 1999
13 people want to read
About the author
Jerome Charyn
223 books230 followersJerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With more than 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.
Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.
In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."
Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.
Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.
In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."
Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 11, 2014
May have become my favorite Charyn.
When I originally researched Captain Kidd I came away with the impression that it's his department stores book, but this is more accurately described as Jerome Charyn's WWII book, and I believe it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Heller's Catch-22.
Amazingly, it's a kind of combination of both, as well as a typical Charyn book, and better than your expectations for either. First off, Kidd's closest parallels are actually with David O'Russell's film Three Kings, which was also released in 1999. Both concern soldiers who act more like pirates, although Kings is set during the Gulf War.
And as it turns out, Kidd is also Charyn's George Patton book. More than a dozen books into my Charyn experience, I've come to appreciate his unique insights into historic figures, and his Patton is no exception. Actually, the Patton who emerges in Captain Kidd may be one of the more complex examples of this particular trend of Charyn's writing. Patton is a supporting character, but he's also emblematic of the atypical quasi-minimalist style that gives Kidd so much of its power. This is one of the shorter books I've read from the author, which lends an evocative feel to the proceedings.
It also helps that there are two characters whose lives are directly explored, the "Captain Kidd" who is Charyn's Yossarian/Billy Pilgrim, and Red, who emerges as perhaps the real lead character, the one who breaks much of the typical Charyn mold. "Kidd" is also known as Roland Kahn, a speechwriter for Patton who serves as a crucial confidant but also has a penchant for theft of Nazi loot, which leads to accidental heroism. Patton is as unpopular as his legacy has proven, though, and so "Kidd" is sent home early and left to deal with the bones of an unwanted legacy of his own, the burden of his family's business success that he improves on with the same instincts that caused him equal trouble in the war. If it's a Charyn book, then the lead character is always getting in trouble.
Red is the counterbalance to everything, the classic Charyn redhead, though one who stumbles less and is more in control of her own life. By the time "Kidd" and Red reunite at the end of the book, you're more than ready to have someone make a movie out of this (c'mon, it has to happen to one of Charyn's books!), a sort of modern Casablanca about the vagaries of morality in wartime. The Charyn orphan figure especially knits into the fabric of the chaos they must survive and how ambiguous things really are.
Charyn grounds the absurdities in his observations in a brutal depiction of the world, but a realistic one. If you ever wondered whether Billy Pilgrim really needed aliens to help explain why Dresden was so terrible, or that Yossarian's experiences perhaps best belonged in an episode of M*A*S*H, then you've been waiting for Captain Kidd all this time and didn't even know it. This is the Charyn you've been looking for, a truly transcendent book from the author, reflective of his other material but somewhere above it. This is what happens when an author trusts his instincts and has honed them so well he can riff gloriously on them.
When I originally researched Captain Kidd I came away with the impression that it's his department stores book, but this is more accurately described as Jerome Charyn's WWII book, and I believe it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Heller's Catch-22.
Amazingly, it's a kind of combination of both, as well as a typical Charyn book, and better than your expectations for either. First off, Kidd's closest parallels are actually with David O'Russell's film Three Kings, which was also released in 1999. Both concern soldiers who act more like pirates, although Kings is set during the Gulf War.
And as it turns out, Kidd is also Charyn's George Patton book. More than a dozen books into my Charyn experience, I've come to appreciate his unique insights into historic figures, and his Patton is no exception. Actually, the Patton who emerges in Captain Kidd may be one of the more complex examples of this particular trend of Charyn's writing. Patton is a supporting character, but he's also emblematic of the atypical quasi-minimalist style that gives Kidd so much of its power. This is one of the shorter books I've read from the author, which lends an evocative feel to the proceedings.
It also helps that there are two characters whose lives are directly explored, the "Captain Kidd" who is Charyn's Yossarian/Billy Pilgrim, and Red, who emerges as perhaps the real lead character, the one who breaks much of the typical Charyn mold. "Kidd" is also known as Roland Kahn, a speechwriter for Patton who serves as a crucial confidant but also has a penchant for theft of Nazi loot, which leads to accidental heroism. Patton is as unpopular as his legacy has proven, though, and so "Kidd" is sent home early and left to deal with the bones of an unwanted legacy of his own, the burden of his family's business success that he improves on with the same instincts that caused him equal trouble in the war. If it's a Charyn book, then the lead character is always getting in trouble.
Red is the counterbalance to everything, the classic Charyn redhead, though one who stumbles less and is more in control of her own life. By the time "Kidd" and Red reunite at the end of the book, you're more than ready to have someone make a movie out of this (c'mon, it has to happen to one of Charyn's books!), a sort of modern Casablanca about the vagaries of morality in wartime. The Charyn orphan figure especially knits into the fabric of the chaos they must survive and how ambiguous things really are.
Charyn grounds the absurdities in his observations in a brutal depiction of the world, but a realistic one. If you ever wondered whether Billy Pilgrim really needed aliens to help explain why Dresden was so terrible, or that Yossarian's experiences perhaps best belonged in an episode of M*A*S*H, then you've been waiting for Captain Kidd all this time and didn't even know it. This is the Charyn you've been looking for, a truly transcendent book from the author, reflective of his other material but somewhere above it. This is what happens when an author trusts his instincts and has honed them so well he can riff gloriously on them.
Displaying 1 of 1 review