War Cries over Avenue C

Tell me what you throw into the garbage, and I will tell you who you are. Jerome Charyn takes two of the champion wastelands of our time--Vietnam and the grimmer reaches of New York's Lower East Side--and superimposes one upon the other. His purpose, in "War Cries Over Avenue C," is to construct blurred images for blurred times.

The characters in this surreal novel of intrigue drift back and forth between the interrogation centers, the hospitals, the back-alley black markets of the Vietnam War and the present-day derelict and drug-infested chunk of Manhattan where the avenues, instead of names or numbers, run from A to D.