The Days of the Bitter End
by Jack Engelhard
19.95, Cover: Hardcover, ISBN: 0-9674074-2-7, ©2001

Set against the backdrop of a monumental news event that touched the lives of all Americans — the assassination of John F. Kennedy — The Days of the Bitter End vividly takes us back to an era that dominates our culture to this very day. The novel captures the passion, and the drama of the 60s, as it recreates the idealism that was won at the emergence of JFK, and then lost at the onset of Vietnam. Jack Engelhard’s book is a true original, especially in the author’s masterful portrayal of his fictional Cliff Harris, the comedian whose career was based solely upon his talent to imitate our most glamorous president — and who thereby personifies not only JFK, but the entire spectrum of that pulsating era.

The novel brings to life the people, places and events that made the 60s so indelible, and Engelhard succeeds in bringing his vision to the fore as he sets before us a Greenwich Village — the focal point of the novel and the 60s — that throbs “to the beat of bongo-drums.”

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We all was somewhere the day President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Those of us old enough, say in our mid-forties now, remember exactly where we heard the news. Those too young or not yet born on November 22, 1963 are nonetheless still paying for the events of the day the world stopped on its axis and began to spin the other way. Certainly, Jack Engelhard remembers, and so would each of the memorable characters from his latest novel, The Days Of the Bitter End.

For Ben Jaffa, doorman at the Bitter End, a popular club on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village—the tough young man closest to Jack’s own experience — the November day punctuated his growing alienation from the Village scene, his three buddies, Richie, Howie, and Cliff, and his girlfriend Louise Carmen, whom he shares with Richie. Ben is a perennial exile, a refugee from Nazi-occupied France who is at home anywhere and no place. At a time of civil rights protests and hootenannies, when Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary sang the songs that topped the charts, and the middle class snickered at Lenny Bruce while he excoriated the sexual foibles of the middle class, Ben’s beef is mainly with himself. He is existential enough to have stepped out of Camus.

Richie Bell, a rich kid from Connecticut, is nicer, flakier, a guitar strummer. But it is typical of Engelhard’s subterranean way with a story that Richie keeps a poisonous snake as a pet and maybe a homicidal tool. Howie, a shmo everybody makes fun of, turns out to be as convoluted as the snake and more dangerous. Louise Carmen is a pleasant surprise: a sophisticated coal miner’s daughter who sings, and loves, better than Loretta Lynn.

In this rich novel you are going to mine some nuggets of character.

Michael Foster, author Three In Love (Harper/Collins)