584
PARTISAN REVIEW
survivals of a moribund ethos, shadows without substance. Donleavy
takes no joy in this situation-his joy is in the honest exposure of it.
Nor is he able to offer any answers. The only positives in the novel–
an earthgoddess type of girl who falls in love with Dangerfield, and
the warm friendship that exists between the few people who, like
Dangerfield, are in on the ghastly secret of our times and act upon it–
are literary cliches derived from Joyce and Hemingway.
The Ginger
Man
is fundamentally a book without hope (Dangerfield is even cut
out of his father's will at the end) and it reflects, more directly than
Elliott or Buechner, I think, the true spiritual contours of this period.
It is a response not to the death of traditional values, not to the dis–
locations caused by industrialism and technology-there are no memories
of an older, more settled way of life here-but precisely to the final
collapse of the bourgeois era, a book that comes out of a moment in
history when the old world has died and the new one about to be born
may never struggle its way out of the womb.
It was, of course, Camus who first spotted the significance of
this
new style of nihilism and identified it, in
The Stranger,
with the patho–
logical apathy of the narrator Meursault-the French were far in ad–
vance of the Americans in seeing that the "rebel" was giving way in
our day to the "stranger." In his latest book, a collection of stories
called
Exile and the Kingdom!
Camus continues to deal with the pre–
dicament of men and women moving dully through an indifferent uni–
verse (he is very much a man in quest of solutions, and not at all
content with mere diagnosis), but my impression is that he has lost the
firm grasp he had on the problem in his earlier work. The decline llet
in with his last novel,
The Fall,
a book that seems to me only a mechan–
ical repetition of what he had already accomplished before, and even
at their best these new stories have nothing of the clear brilliance and
beauty of
The Stranger
or the thickness of texture that distinguished
The
Plague.
Nevertheless, Camus is in a different class from the
three
American writers I have just been discussing, not only because he
brings a much wider historical and philosophical perspective to bear on
the common theme, but because for him the Meursaults exist as a
sinis–
ter possibility, they are a projection of what he himself might so easily
become, rather than an image of what he already is. The source of
his
power is not in my opinion his superior artistry (indeed, as a craftsman
of
the novel he is rather poorly endowed by comparison with a dozen
lesser writers), but in the very delicate balance he manages to strike
between identification with the nihilists he writes about and detach-
+.
Knopf.
,3.50.
