Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on October 30, 2012 

I'm not sure what Under the Eye of God is meant to be. Is it a thriller that doesn't thrill? A political satire that isn't funny? A melodrama that lacks emotion? The novel attempts to be many things and doesn't succeed at any of them. The meandering story is eventful, but it is ultimately a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Isaac Sidel, the immensely popular gun-toting mayor of New York, is running for vice president in 1988. The scandal-ridden presidential candidate is Michael Storm. Sidel is wildly popular with the electorate, largely because he carries a Glock and regularly shoots people with it, and is largely responsible for Storm's victory. The incumbent president, perhaps an even bigger scoundrel than Storm, decides to frame Sidel as a pedophile (an accusation made possible only because Sidel is inexplicably traveling on a campaign bus with Storm's immensely popular twelve-year-old girl), thus nullifying the party's best asset. Sidel tumbles to the plot only because the president's astrologer abandons him after he punches her in the nose. We learn all of this in a preposterous first chapter that ends with Sidel tackling an apparent assassin because the four screamingly incompetent Secret Service agents charged with protecting him are too far away to act.

Later in the novel we learn that the astrologer isn't who she seems to be, that various would-be assassins aren't who they seem to be, and that a glamorous woman named Inez -- who becomes the most recent of Sidel's varied love interests -- is really Trudy Winckleman. Trudy is the modern incarnation of the orginal Inez, a woman who captivated gangster Arnold Rothstein in the 1920s. Rothstein was the mentor of David Pearl who, in turn, became Sidel's mentor. By 1988, Pearl owns a good chunk of New York City and has unsettling plans for the Bronx. A conflict naturally ensues between Pearl and Sidel.

The disjointed plot careens like a go-kart with no brakes driven by a blind gorilla. It makes jarring departures from present to past, from place to place and event to event, moving in such a frenetic, haphazard fashion that the reader has no opportunity to settle in and enjoy the ride. Every time it seems like Jerome Charyn might be ready to tell a coherent story, a new tangent emerges to send the plot skidding off in another direction. Each chapter addresses a fresh scandal, resulting in a disturbing discontinuity. The binding thread is a scheme that comes to Sidel's attention when he sees the Army Corps of Engineers stumbling around in the Bronx, but the scheme receives only sporadic attention and even if it were believable, it wouldn't be interesting. With so much going on, it is surprising that the story is so often dull.

At its best, Under the Eye of God reads like an ode to New York City, particularly its architecture. Charyn writes lovingly of the Ansonia, home of such luminaries as Enrico Caruso and Babe Ruth. Of course, Sidel can't enter the Ansonia without shooting someone with his Glock. Maybe Sidel is supposed to be modeled upon Rudy "Look at Me, I'm Tough on Crime" Giuliani, but even Rudy left the actual killing to the NYPD.

As political satire, Under the Eye of God is hopeless. Every political character in the novel is corrupt except, of course, for the straight-shooting Sidel. Satire this heavy-handed is too predictable to be funny. The novel fails as a love story because it's impossible to care whether Sidel will fulfill his fickle romantic ambitions. As a crime novel, the story is a bust. Crime permeates the novel but none of it can be taken seriously. The story fails to create the slightest bit of dramatic tension. With no humor, no believable drama, and no characters worth caring about, Under the Eye of God doesn't deserve to fall under the eye of any reader.

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