586
PARTISAN REVIEW
noticed when he sees his wife (whom he loves) hit by a car, and he
spends the rest of the novel trying to do penance by tracking down a
compromising photograph which can damage the career of a close
friend-an act that he has decided will help him get a fresh start
in
life. The book is imbued with the same sense of the purposelessness of
the common routines that you come upon in John Wain's
Hurry on
Down,
and a strong feeling that everyone in the modem world, ordinary
people no less than self-conscious questioners, is at heart a nihilist:
Suffering was hidden away-in hospitals and asylums. As a result they
had no attitude to it--except resentment that it should be brought to
their notice. The suffering they didn't know about, which wasn't illness or
hunger, but just empty unhappiness- that was hidden too, behind their
prosperous faces, behind the hire-purchased walnut suite, the four-seater
saloon with mother in the back. . . .
As for the hero himself, his terrible confusions are seen as a product
of the absence of any values in the society he inhabits which he can
accept happily or rebel against (either course would give his life
meaning) :
"Can you imagine not knowing the difference between right and
wrong?" [he asks a gir!.]
"No."
"I can. One person says do this, another do that. I like them both.
I understand exactly why they say what they say and think the other
absurd. I can think the way either of them think. What should I do?"
"You must fee!."
"I sometimes genuinely don't---or rather I feel both. Then what am
I to do? Start arguing? I haven't the intelligence. Anyway it's a life
work."
The only exceptions to this rule are a few Bohemians whose protest
against the emptiness of modem life is to "refuse to do what doesn't
interest them."
The oppressive gloom of
Happy as Larry
stands in the sharpest
possible contrast to the destructive exhilaration of
The Ginger Man:
Hinde can hardly bear the pain of looking at what his own book re–
veals. Yet beneath this gloom, one senses the presence of a notion that
the problem is fundamentally social, and therefore soluble by political
action. Unlike his American literary contemporaries, Hinde, I would
guess, believes that the process of disintegration he finds in the world
around him is reversible-an understandable sentiment in a country
where technology and mass culture are so much less taken for granted
than here (what American writer would use the fact that people com-
