Pinocchio's Nose (review)

Writers and critics celebrated Pinocchio's hundredth birthday with many new editions of and articles about Collodi's classic. Perhaps the most singular example of centenary Pinocchiana is Jerome Charyn's free-wheeling novel Pinocchio's Nose. Charyn's novel is not a children's book, but it is of interest to adults who wish to explore the connections between juvenile and adult literature. Like Russell Hoban's adult books, Pinocchio's Nose is both childlike and jaded. It is as vital as the original L'Avventura di Pinocchio, drawing much of its energy and richness from tapping the mythic matrix of Collodi's masterpiece. Reading it is a treat for anyone who thinks that Pinocchio was and is an important book.

Charyn's novel is a first person narrative of a fortyish disaffected Bronx intellectual whose name is the same as that of the book's author. If it is at all autobiographical, then it is a phantasmagorical life Charyn has led. The book's hero is the son of a warm-hearted junkman and a domineering but loving mater familias, who survives by playing every angle and by keeping house in a tenement on an otherwise burned out block for her brother, an international underworld figure. Romey, as the hero is often called, grows up relatively parentless in a world of subterfuge and violence. At an early age he reads Pinocchio. So great is his identification with the bumbling puppet that he becomes Pinocchio in a fantasy life that helps him cope with the unpleasant confusion of reality. As he grows older, his obsession becomes so complete that for long stretches of the novel, real world existence is but a shadow of his puppet incarnation.

This character's real life is so turbulent that his becoming Pinocchio might well be a welcome relief. But life is full of chances, as Collodi's Geppetto is fond of pointing out, and both Romey and his puppet self undergo a series of adventures as fantastic as those of the original wooden head. Romey eventually writes a best selling sequel to Pinocchio; in fact, everyone refers to him as Pinocchio, even when as an old man he sits in the Senate of the Republic of Texas. As a puppet, Jerome-Pinocchio, born of a socialist woodcutter in fascist Italy, possessor of a phallic nose, rises to the exalted rank of Ducelino, right-hand marionette of Mussolini.

If all of this sounds absurd, it is, and for good reason; the rules of the novel's fictive world are absurd. But aside from occasional magic, they seem more or less consistent with those of twentieth century life.

Like Pinocchio, Charyn's novel is a bildungsroman. The heroes of both books are set adrift in the big world and must learn through experience how to behave in order to survive. In Collodi's book, Geppetto treats his son well, and tries to instill in the wayward puppet traditional values such as filial piety, industriousness, kindness, and good judgment. Pinocchio rebels and suffers a series of unpleasant but logical consequences. In the end, he saves then cares for his aged father, works for his daily bread, and treats others fairly. For these virtues he is rewarded with boyhood. One feature of Pinocchio's ordeal that is often overlooked is the extent to which his world abounds in venal authority figures. Obedience to authority is not enough; obedience to just authority and, above all, one's own sense of right and wrong, is what is most important. Thus, as didactic as Pinocchio might seem to us, it is a novel about choice. Pinocchio becomes a boy not simply because he makes the "right" choices, but because those choices lead logically towards healthy psychic development.

The same is true of Charyn's book, except that the choices are more varied and the consequences less certain. His hero's father is a failure, a junk man who retires to his pile of rags rather than participate in his wife's con games. Like his father, Romey has trouble...