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Seven daring but inept Tokyo thugs planned a kidnaping that would rock the nation. Their intended victim: Emperor Hirohito's youngest daughter, the former Princess Suga. She was to be held for $138,888, the biggest ransom in Japanese history. Disguised as a meter reader, one plotter entered and cased the princess' house. The gang moved in for the snatch three times, only to have something go awry. Before they could make a fourth try, the police were tipped off and collared the gang, building an airtight case with full confessions. Yet last spring the accused were convicted...
...with pitiless banality, time passed." So writes James T. Farrell on page 399 of his 18th novel, accurately describing the way time has passed for his characters, and for the reader, in the preceding 398 pages. Banality is what Farrell's novel is about, and it is also the novel's sole literary device. The people of the book are joyless, hateless, empty of good or evil, fleshy machines that transmit at the audible level the prattle of Babbittry and, octaves above, the silent scream of tedium. The prose in which they are described is also joyless...
...Submen. In this willfully limited goal he is successful. The novel's desultory action occupies about two years, and reading about it provides the horrifying illusion of having spent that long with Farrell's submen. The reader's reaction is likely to be exasperation...
Farrell says insistently that most people are dreary, not fascinating, and the reader imagines Farrell saying "I'm not going to divert you from the important truth of dullness by presenting my dull people in an entertaining way. I'm going to be as dull as possible about...
This hilarious first novel can be enjoyed by the general reader for its grotesque comedy, savored by the insider for its satire on the folkways of Greenwich Village intellectuals. "I raised you from a Middlebrow. I weaned you away from the art films, showed you the difference between the Western as mass myth and mass rite," one character tells another. It can also be read as a seriocomic exploration of the hollowness concealed beneath the vintage sophistication that has long been identified as Greenwich Village at its most intellectually pretentious...