THE NEW NIHILISM
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with more weak passages than it can comfortably assimilate, but It IS
also an extremely funny novel, and its vitality is more than merely
rhetorical.
In
a furiously exuberant prose style that suggests wild horses
let loose, Donleavy lashes about with abandon at everything in sight,
only to find that he has been flailing the empty air, so utterly has the
once solid structure of middle-class respectability disintegrated from lack
of any conviction to prop it up. His hero, Sebastian Dangerfield, is a
young expatriate American studying in Dublin on the G.!. Bill, where
he has forced his English wife and their baby to live in squalor and
poverty. The studying is a farce ; he has no intention of becoming a
lawyer or anything else. All he is doing is marking time until his prosper–
ous father dies, and he intends to go on marking time for the rest of
his days when he comes into his inheritance. He is a drunkard, a
philanderer, a cheat, a liar, and even a petty thief. At first, we respond
to him as we do to any character in fiction who allows us to participate
in the fantasy of complete release, especially when the release largely
takes the fonn of constant drinking and jumping from bed to bed. And
so it comes as a momentous shock when we begin to realize that Danger–
field is not an endearing "Rabelaisian" rascal. Not only does he treat
his wife with appalling cruelty, but we learn that because he has been
stealing their baby's milk money, the infant has developed a case of
rickets. This is no joke, and it jolts us right out of the realm of pleasant
fantasy into the most sordid of realities-which, of course, is exactly
what Donleavy wants it to do. Why, then, do we continue to feel the
attraction of Dangerfield? What claim does he exert on our sympathies?
The decisive factor,
I
think, is his honesty. Unlike almost everyone
else in the book (and incidentally unlike Kerouac's heroes, with whom
he has been foolishly compared), he never simulates feelings that he
does not in fact feel, he refuses to make excuses, and he will not hide
behind empty pieties. He is not a bum and a scoundrel out of ill will or
malice or insensitivity. On the contrary, he strikes us as a man who
has looked into himself and found nothing, and then looked about the
world and found no set of values (neither "traditional" nor "liberal")
in sufficiently robust condition to exert any pull over his soul. Danger–
field, in short, is not enacting a fantasy of release, he is living by the
truth of his times. Nor is he a rebel, for there is nothing to rebel against,
everything gives way before him. He is-to use the tenninology adopted
by Alfred Kazin in a brilliant article in the current issue of
Psychoanalysis
and the Psychoanalytic R eview-an
example of the "stranger" as hero,
an example of what becomes of the impulse toward rebellion at a mo–
ment in history when the only conventions in existence are anachronistic
