[Jerome Charyn in "The Franklin Scare"] has tamed his prose and makes it perform tricks. It is a New York prose, street-smart, sly and full of lurches, like a series of subway stops on the way to hell. It sets its energy from popular culture, and its essential moral concerns arrive in a kind of drag of language, a hip uniform, thumbs hooked in the belt. It will never allow itself to sound corny, but, always in motion, always angling, it gets the job done, as if selling us a bridge or a silo of olive oil.

And yet what is so astonishing and satisfying about "The Franklin Scare" is that, inside its pop conventions and its hip parodies, it likes Eleanor and Franklin every bit as much as Joseph Lash does. It builds, out of their eccentricities and foibles and the socks they wear in their private...