Chin Music: A Novel of the Jazz Age

A pubescent girl named Henrietta Fine is the picaro or rogue of this picaresque novel, set in New Jersey, New York City, and Saratoga Springs, New York during the annual horse racing meeting there. Henrietta's Huckleberry-Finn-like adventures and encounters encompass, like Huck's, an encyclopedia of mendacity, theft, religious revivals, mediums and seances, phony princesses and dukes, rubes (It didn't take a genius to see that his elevator didn't stop at the top floor") and shills.

Lest the reader miss the analogy, "Henny" meets a handyman-pastor's son whom his father dresses as a girl and whose name is Sarah Mary Williams. And for the obstinately imperceptive reader Henny reads and muses upon Twain's novella, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," and even remarks, "I'm Huckleberry Finn in a dress." Along the way, she becomes sexually aware and experienced, mating with three men (including one who forces himself upon her) before her eighteenth birthday.

Through he! r eyes we behold lush scenery, opulent furnishings, nuances of character, and the various shades and attendant challenges of deceit. Through his heroine, Levitt captures the racial and religious bigotry, insecurity, hypocrisy, and materialism of an age in which the glaring disparities between the American dream and the American reality, the affluent and the impoverished, underlie the class and cultural conflicts that place this novel in the rich Anglo-American tradition while showcasing the author's remarkable individual talents as an observer, humorist, storyteller, and writer.

This work is colored throughout by the ethnic authenticity of Italian and Yiddish phrases, most of which, among other terms, are defined in a glossary.
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