The Ginger Man

First published in Paris, the novel is set in Ireland just after World War II. Upon its publication, it was banned in the Republic of Ireland and the United States of America for obscenity. There are a few novelists who are writing out of a sense of what the contemporary world is all about. The best of them is J. P. Donleavy. -- The New York Times Book Review It is one of the books which reveals their quality from the first line. On every page there is that immediacy all good writing has. It follows the often racy misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American living in Dublin with his English wife and infant daughter and studying law at Trinity College. This book may be considered part of the fictionalised roar of the end of the Second World War hiatus, also represented by the colossi of American literature: John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. Dangerfield is an American Protestant of Irish descent, commonly believed to be a thinly fictionalised version of the author, but is more broadly based not only on Donleavy but also some of his contemporaries at Trinity. The hero, Dangerfield, is a portrayal of lifelong bohemian and friend of Donleavy, Gainor Stephen Crist, as told by the author in "A History of The Ginger Man". The book gives us the map of the terra incognita of late 1950s sexual encounters in Dublin. Donleavy's later books spell out the aftermath (particularly A Fairy Tale of New York, which later inspired Shane MacGowan's song "Fairytale of New York", recorded by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl).