JP Donleavy once described himself as a comfortably burned out volcano. A Singular Man was written when the volcano was still spitting fire and lava. It's the story of George Smith – incredibly wealthy, incredibly lonely and incredibly snake-bitten. George is obsessed with two things: death and the alluring Miss Sally Thompson, sans the horse of a dog she calls her pet.Donleavy's unconventional use of language and punctuation – sentence fragments and run-ons, the shifting from fist person to third – the omission of question marks and so on – may take some getting used to, but it serves to bring us deeper into his world, a world where even the most familiar things are strangely mutated. Hunter S. Thompson had this to say about A Singular Man...[It's] “like sitting down to an evening of good whiskey and mad laughter in a rare conversation somewhere on the edge of reality.”George Smith is rich. Just how rich is never revealed, but it's implied that he is as wealthy as they come, wealthy enough to withdraw an enormous amount of cash and rain it down on the public from atop one his tall buildings. And we're allowed into the character's head, access Donleavy is apt to provide... “Here on this little bench. You left me wretched Sally Thompson. You left me sad. Last night on Her Majesty's balcony couldn't you see me wave. In the light breeze weeping. Her Majesty sleeping. Laughed lightly letting treasury notes slip out from fingers. Down over the city, separating in the dark. Fell so silently. Without pomp in the crazy circumstance. I thought let urine be followed by gold.JustForAChange.”A Singular Man is about the pursuit of completion, the search for love and solace, be it down paths rife with heartache and disappointment or be it running on the track of pleasant surprise. WhereEven theHeaviest burdenCan beDropped.
Hunter S. Thompson calls the Ginger Man by this author his favorite and the most influential book on his own career. This novel is equally well respected by the media of that day, but the book is a disaster to the modern reader, coming across as a weak imitation of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt crossed with the work of Henry Miller (though not nearly as risque). The main fault of the book is that the exposition between dialog--indeed the two books mentioned here were plays as well--is the sort of Beat inspired stream of consciousness that prevents the narrative from gaining any forward momentum. Those passages are such an awful slog that it takes well over 150 pages for the sparkling dialog to hook the reader. This is unfortunate, as our time continues to be wasted with only occasionally and marginally better exposition (jarring scene cuts and shifts in perspective and vague imagery are the rule, and a major plot point is left wholly unresolved as new elements are introduced to no point). The main character is empty in a way that the tragic figure of Babbitt was not, and the major events at the end of the novel are forced and crass and quite unbelievable, even as we discover that we cannot muster any empathy for any of the major players. My rating would have been a single star if not for the good dialog.
Do You like book A Singular Man (1994)?
This is another book that had a profound influence on me when I was younger.Just out of interest I recently went back and read it again.It is easy to read this book as just about the content, malarky, high jinks, sex and wealth. But there is a poetic melancholia that runs underneath everything in this book. I think it was the first book that resonated within me as in someone had given a name to something that I had felt at the core of me ever since I can remember.I feel a bit different these days, not much though, more that I’ve had years to get used to it. Reading it really took me back to my earlier self.There are 2 other books by him that you could almost put in a trilogy, The others are:The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar BA Fairy Tale of new York
—Dead John Williams
