#304 Adonis- Jerome Charyn

There is nothing quite like New York City. You don’t have to be rich, you just have to be interesting. You hang around long enough and you find yourself woven in the fabric of some crazy world; everybody is connected.

A young high school boy, a poor talented artist, with a family beaten down by war and misfortune is snatched up by a modeling impresario, Rosenzweig, aka-Dracula. This blood sucker has taken many young beautiful models and made them rich, but at what cost?

“I’d lost my belief in Van Gogh’s missing ear—it seemed like madness, not the mystery of great art.”

He finds himself in an intoxicating world of artists, mobsters, scene-makers. But like any intoxicant, too much is poison. Even with a box of cash under your bed, free meals and fancy parties, life gets complicated.  This story is half about the boy, and half about New York, a divided city between the old tradition and the new ethnic underworld:

“We belonged to that clan of West Siders who never wore watch fobs or attended debutante balls. We had galas for indigent artists.”

 Notable Passage: “I had to ride the local in and out of the Bronx. Each stop was a kind of purgatory.”

Rating: 9-9-8-8 Total= 34