Chin Music: A Novel of the Jazz Age

by Paul M. Levitt

New York City in 1922 saw showpeople like Fanny Brice and Harry Houdini rubbing shoulders with confidence men and bootleggers like Arnold Rothstein, the gambler reputed to have fixed the 1919 World Series. Henrietta Fine, a precocious sixteen-year-old apprentice locksmith, weaves in and out of this world, living by her wits and the double-cross. Her safe cracking skills make her useful to both Houdini and to the wily Rothstein, who provides cover...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570984042
• ISBN13: 9781570984044
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Roberts Rinehart Publishers
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Rip Roaring Times

I read this book with great pleasure. The research that makes it so enjoyable is evident. This is not a quick pot boiler; but rather a scholarly, highly amusing and enlightening trip to the not so distant American past. I found a fine companion piece to follow, the biography of Mrs. Warren G. Harding, the Duchess. I'm ever so pleased to have set the scene with Chin Music. I eagerly await Levitt's next novel.

A captivating tale of danger, resourcefulness, survivorship.

Paul M. Levitt's Chin Music is narrated in the first person by a young woman, Henrietta Fine, who shows herself to be courageous, daring, compassionate, and vulnerable. Her broadening experiences involve friends of varying cultures and livelihoods who offer her questionable advice and dubious employment (with strings attached) to help improve her poor financial situation, in the process plunging her into adventures that threaten her life. She grows to be dangerously self-reliant, with a halo of suspense and surprise crowning her story and compelling the reader to pay close attention to each word and every nuance of relationship within her circle of mysterious friends and ruthless gangsters. Her bold personality is softened by her love for her mother, whose inheritance, which had been stolen by a brother-in-law, Henrietta recovers by applying skills acquired from a locksmith for whom she had briefly worked. Similarly, she breaks into a safe owned by her uncle, who had appropriated her deceased father's tailoring business, along with the fabrics and equipment, and had become wealthy. Henrietta finds his cash stashed in shoe boxes and makes good her escape. The tragedies which she witnesses through associations with Twenties "wise guys" leave indelible impressions upon her mind but also teach her how to win admission to a college, leading to the fulfillment of her beloved father's dream that she obtain a university education.

read it--it's fun

I just finished reading Chin Music and I have to tell you it's fun, fast-paced, fluent--a pleasure. If you like coming-of-age stories, you will enjoy the amazing escapades of Henrietta Fine. If you like American literature, you will enjoy references to some of our great works (especially Huck Finn and Gatsby). If you like American history, you will enjoy learning about the Jazz age from the bootleggers' viewpoint. If you like dialect, you will have a chance to learn gangsterese and jazz slang. If you like lyrical prose, you will find plenty. If you want your reading time to be an adventure that helps you appreciate other people in other times, you won't be disappointed.

A Masterful Novel in the Traditions of Fitzgerald and Twain

Among the prefatory acknowledgments of contributors to his debut novel, Chin Music, which is flapper slang for gossip, Professor of English and Writing Paul M. Levitt of the University of Colorado includes F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain, without whose works the novel "could not have been scripted." In case the reader misses this hint about the provenance of his work, the author provides additional clues, parading appropriately named characters in imitation of the charactonyms describing West Egg socialites in The Great Gatsby: a lothario is called Rodman, aka Rodd; a prissy physician who believes in the subordination of women is named Littlewick. For Fitzgerald's Port Washington and Oyster Bay (the two Eggs, west and east), Levitt substitutes New York City, New Jersey, and, above all, Saratoga Springs, New York during its August horse-racing meeting. For Huckleberry Finn he substitutes a pubescent girl named Henrietta Fine, the picaro or rogue of this picaresque novel, whose 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 short story, "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 her 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, and writer. One example of Levitt's symbolism will suffice: having implicitly redefined WASPS as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Supremacists, the first-person narrator describes a scene in a Harlem apartment building's elevator: "At the first level, a man dressed all in white entered the elevator. Sharon [the elevator operator] greeted him. `Good evening, Reverend Celestial. Warm enough for you today?' A wasp had found its way into the elevator and seemed, in particular, drawn to the reverend, who tried to wave it away." (Page 198) This work is colored throughout by the ethnic authenticity of Italian and Yiddish phrases, most of which are defined in a glossary. It is perhaps a telling commentary upon