Jerome Charyn seems to handicap himself right off by giving the first-person lead of [The Catfish Man] to a ringer named "Jerome Charyn." Hasn't the word gone out among novelists to lay off that one for a while? But then, one of Charyn's best acts is playing dumb. His apparently self-assertive gesture gives this mock autobiography … an atmosphere of flaky exhiliration. No snob appeal here, and the subtitle offers us "a conjured life," so as I begin to read I rashly decide that The Catfish Man is going to show us how life in general, and Charyn's in particular, can be reimagined. To serve his metaphor, we can with a kick of our tails swim upstream against fate, especially if we're up to sniffing which way the current's flowing. I am, of course, mistaken—not least because one can't sniff the direction of current.

The knucklehead Jerome Charyn...