After finishing the Donleavy autobiography "The History of the Ginger Man" I returned for the fourth or fifth time to reading the novel since my first encounter with it as a teenager some forty years ago. I felt a new appreciation of it this time. "The Ginger Man" is a masterpiece of bedlam: a triumphant liberating joyous despairing ribald life-filled tragi-comic treasure. The first chapters are good but then Donleavy begins to drive the action and his main character to ever wilder pitches of intensity outrageousness and lyricism until the "terrifying heart" of the Ginger Man threatens to spill over and drown us all in its terrifying dsrkness.
The novel written by Brooklyn -born Bronx-raised Donleavy offers a unique record of one of the most grotesque unbelievable bizarre and unprecedented literary universes ever to exist: that of economically-deprived Catholic -repressed Dublin in the late 40s early 50s, and of which Donleavy was a prime mover and this novel perhaps its most extraordinary expression. After Joyce Beckett and the extraordinary Flann, Dublin surely belongs to the American boy.
I have only two laments. One, that the novel did not cause an avalanche in a later younger generation of indigenous Irish writers; you could roll your Barrys Bolgers McCabes and even Banvilles up in a dark corner of Donleavy and still not see them there. Sadly. The censoring Irish State did far too well its castrating work.
My second lament: reading so many petty spiteful uncomprehendingly negative reviews on Kindle and other book sites. The world Donleavy raised his impertinent first at has not gone away. As recorded in the autobiography this narrow-minded narrow-hearted world would have smothered Donleavy's liberating novel at birth were it not for his own dogged and indomitable belief in its value and determination to see it published.
I despair to see the eyes of the narrow uncomprehending and censorious touch "The Ginger Man"... If looks can kill well then the eyes of such readers have been killing real writing and real writers since the days of Shakespeare., And before.... Can't they find some anodyne lair in which to nuzxle and suckle?... And leave real writers and real novels alone...
And God's mercy on the terrifying heart of the real Ginger Man!
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Balwant Rai
“Have you seen a lot of women?" "Wouldn't say a lot." "And what were they like?" "Naked.”
Reviewed in India on July 7, 2017
