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Singular Ginger. The novelist who is most truly black and funny about sex and death is James Patrick ("Mike") Donleavy, 42, who was born in Brooklyn, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and now divides his time between London and the Isle of Man. Donleavy succeeds better than any of the others in combining the age-old immediacy of priapic comedy with an excruciatingly contemporary sense of human absurdity. He might best be described as a uniquely modern Aristophanist with an existential horror of death.
In the person of The Ginger Man, Sebastian Dangerfield, Donleavy in 1958 created one of the most outrageous scoundrels in contemporary fiction, a whoring, boozing young wastrel who sponges off his friends and beats his wife and girl friends. Author Donleavy then turns the moral universe on its head by making the reader love Dangerfield for his killer instinct, flamboyant charm, wit, flashing generosity—and above all for his wild, fierce, two-handed grab for every precious second of life. "More," "Now" and "Eeeeee!" are Dangerfield's key words.
Donleavy's second novel, A Singular Man, is more ambitious and less successful. Ostensibly the story of George Smith, a beleaguered self-made millionaire, the book is really an almost plotless fantasy set in a New York City that is ruled by death and death's symbols. In it, the author's comic mask slips to reveal the skull that grins beneath.
A Step Beyond. Just behind these movers and shakers are other black humorists, many with similar targets. The life-denying mindlessness often evident in modern psychiatric care got savagely raked in Ken Kesey's brilliant, creepy first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Television got its lumps in Golk, Richard G. Stern's novel about a TV show that puts unsuspecting people on camera. The Negro problem was the subject of Warren Miller's recent The Siege of Harlem, a sly, timely pseudo history of how Harlem became a separate nation. Some writers, of course, take up black humor for just one novel, like Kesey or Stern, and then go on to other things. But other novelists who are not themselves black humorists have also felt the liberating influence of the wild ones.
Satire has always been an aggressively complex response to the world. As employed by the black humorists, it is a response to a world grown mechanized and impersonal, where even stupidity, viciousness and anxiety can seem institutionalized. At its most proficient, their writing takes the step beyond complaint to scorn; beyond alienation to the assertion of the individual; beyond the" absurd to laughter at absurdity. At its worst, their laughter can be shrill, silly, or self-indulgent. It has yet to blow down Jericho, let alone the Book-of-the-Month Club. For the best of the new breed, writers like Barth and Donleavy, it is the work still in their typewriters that will determine their ultimate standing. Meanwhile they are delighting many a reader who can unsettle down with a good book.