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Overview
Cast in the form of a hilariously ribald parody of a literary quarterly, The Tar Baby is a brilliant, audacious, story-filled novel populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies. A commemorative issue honoring the late Anatole Waxman-Weissman, the book/journal parodies a number of academic fads and concerns as the various contributors expose their and their subject's many idiosyncrasies while pursuing their own private agendas."Clever, witty, and different," Publishers Weekly called the novel upon its original publication in 1973: "Ribald, tongue-in-cheek, Nabokovian." Library Journal's Bruce Allen called it "an object lesson in how visionary idealists become mired in mundaneness, and an ingeniously scatological and funny celebration of unsubduably dirty life forces." Long out of print, this is the first paperback edition of Charyn's most complex and innovative novel.
"Jerome Charyn has long ranked among the most talented, intelligent, and persevering of my contemporaries; and his fiction has established a solidly developing body of achievement. However, The Tar Baby represents a leap ahead, both conceptually and stylistically, and the sheer hilarity of the sustainedly marvelous invention ought to win for the book the audience it deserves." (Richard Kostelanetz)
"Clever, witty, and different. . . . Ribald, tongue-in-cheek, Nabokovian. Charyn's ingenuity and versatility are evident, and he will undoubtedly entertain sophisticates with his sly digs, buffoonery, and mazelike plot." (Publishers Weekly 9-27-72)
"An object lesson in how visionary idealists become mired in mundaneness, and an ingeniously scatological and funny celebration of unsubduably dirty life forces. . . . Charyn makes it all work, howlingly, in a brilliantly managed surrealistic collage, not much inferior to those of Barth and Nabokov—for me, the year's best novel so far." (Bruce Allen, Library Journal 11-1-72)
"An important book . . . an experiment in complex impressionistic and involutional form, striking and original in the extremes to which it juxtaposes comic stereotype and real suffering." (Albert J. Guerard, TriQuarterly)