#99: The Ginger Man

Lord.  I knew this day would come.  


The day I'd have to write about The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy.


sigh,  Here goes:


My name is Diana, and I was assaulted by The Ginger Man. 


I hate to follow up my tepid post about The Magnificent Ambersons with another not-so-raving review.  The Magnificent Ambersons wasn't a bad book, just lukewarm to my taste.  


But reading The Ginger Man was like picking up a handsome, charming guy at a bar, only to wake up the next morning to find that he's knocked you up, stolen your wallet, peed all over your toilet seat, and skipped out of town.  Coincidentally, this is exactly what the main character of The Ginger Man, Dangerfield, would do if you were to pick him up at a bar.


The Ginger Man is the story of Sebastian Dangerfield (ostensibly a ginger) and the time he spent in 1947 post-war Dublin.  Dangerfield and his wife, take up living in the city and their fortunes decline as he becomes a boozy womanizer who apologetically owes money to any and everyone.  His wife is a fragile harridan-in-training, whose upper-class upbringing makes her ill-prepared for married life with the shiftless con-artist that her husband became.  They also have an infant daughter, who is, by some miracle, not inadvertently killed by neglect.


From what I can gather, readers are meant to appreciate the clever way in which Dangerfield manages to duck responsibility and eke by in a time and place where everyone is scraping hard just to get from day to day.  But unlike the beloved B'rer Rabbit, Dangerfield's character exists, more than just to be the cleverest sort of survivor, but to create chaos for the downtrodden people in his immediate vicinity.  He reminds me of the fable of the Farmer and the Viper.  


The character, the story itself--flopped for me because of the pettiness of it all.  Don't misunderstand:  I love a good villain.  A Claude Frollo overcome by lust and the weird erotic cross-purposes of Catholicism is wonderful.  A child-beating Fagin?  Delightful.  A haunt-eyed Mrs. Danvers?  Yes, please.  These are great antagonists.  It requires a certain life-path for a true villain to form, and subconsciously we readers look for it, we seek out the point at with that person was fresh or just like us and trace the fascinating journey from there to the character as is.  It's what makes the villain interesting at all, that question:  How are we alike?  


But Diana, you say, having read the book, surely Donleavy did not intend for the rakish Dangerfield to be the antagonist of the story?  That's the funny thing about stories, poetry, and other art:  they have a way of instantly getting away from you and heading to an entirely new place.  Given that Dangerfield was based, in part, on Donleavy himself, I doubt he was meant to be a villain.  But just as Tucker Max finds the gall to look at himself in the bathroom mirror every morning, I'd like to posit here that maybe Donleavy, and ipso facto, Dangerfield, is a bona fide asshole and has not fully come to clarity on that fact, thereby making him the definition of...if not a truly great villain at least a thorn in everyone's side, a biting fly, in short, a plague on those unfortunate enough to be in his close company.  And there's the rub:  I love the concept of seeing a story through the eyes of a villain, but suffering through the adventures of a petty worm like Dangerfield?  Please.  Why would I tag along with Flotsam and Jetsam on their off-hours when I could be spending time with Ursula, the sea witch?


Skip this one and head straight to #98 on the Modern Library's 100 Greatest Novels list:  The Postman Always Rings Twice!