Books: A Terrible Beauty

MARILYN THE WILD by JEROME CHARYN 246 pages. Arbor House. $8.95.

In Marilyn the Wild, Jerome Char-yn’s ninth novel, father questing becomes a bizarre and moving search-and-destroy mission. Isaac Sidel, the flintiest, least corrupt, most overbearing cop in New York, is a self-appointed patriarch of the Lower East Side. For 20 years he has kept his microcosm free of outside influence. But too many people now find it hard to breathe when he is around.

Isaac’s family slowly pries loose his grip on its life. His wife deserts him. His barked order no longer controls his anarchic daughter Marilyn, a Sarah Lawrence spitfire who consumes and casts off husbands. He can no longer reach his gently demented mother, who brings Arabs home to bed down in her rag shop. Isaac’s brother Leo is an alimony evader who would rather stay in jail playing pinochle with his wardens than return to the streets. The cop’s only solace resides in the bear hugs of Ida Stutz, the devoted fiancee who spoons him full of honey on cold nights.

Nor is the house of Isaac merely out of control; it is also under attack. The Lollipop Gang, a trio of teen-age terrorists, preys on Isaac’s women, roughing up Ida and stalking Marilyn. A Lower East Side liberation front, the Lollipops wage a perverse holy war on Isaac’s sway. The policeman’s determination to keep his fief in order and the Lollipops’ efforts to tear it apart are the core of this brilliantly conceived, tortuously crafted novel.

Marilyn the Wild is flawed by its own rampaging vitality. A Charyn character cannot simply put on a coat: Es ther Rose’s “fist burrowed into her sleeve like the skull of a groundhog.”

Too many adversaries shrill in the same vituperative key. Even lovers snarl their sweet nothings, as if they were pouring poison into each other’s ears.

Yet the author endows his most gro tesque characters with a certain beau ty. His kinkiest people — an albino Negro pyromaniac, a senile, one-eyed dishwasher — are the imaginings of a major talent.

This volume is the second part of a crime-and-punishment trilogy that be gan with Blue Eyes (1974) and will be completed with the publication next fall of The Education of Patrick Silver, in which Isaac rides again. The prolific Charyn, 38, an associate professor of English at the City University of New York, also has two other works in progress, including the history of an imaginary European kingdom called Whalebone. A resourceful scavenger of story ideas, Charyn says the inspiration for the Isaac trilogy came from night mares of his brother, a homicide detective in the New York police department. Whalebone was provoked by a reading of Emperor Maximilian’s brief maladroit reign in mid-19th century Mexico.