JP Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man, began this posthumously-published novel in 1999, and completed it in 2007, though it is released by Lilliput for the first time this year. A Letter Marked Personal is a strange beast, hanging as it does on a plot device deployed in the very last pages of the book. It follows lingerie entrepreneur Nathan Johnson, who lives and works in New York, as is conducting an affair-of-the-heart with his young employee, whilst his wife Muriel flits in and out of the narrative. He is a thoroughly unlikeable character, though Donleavy tries often to gesture towards his moral calibre.
The letter of the title arrives with only 20 or so pages of the novel left, but the importance it is given, and the suspense its late appearance creates, sets up a sense of promise that is never quite fulfilled. Without giving any spoilers, the letter is rather an anti-climax, coming a little out of the blue, and though it reflects on the behaviour of the protagonist, it never fully links with the plot of the book as a whole. The other effect of this promised letter is that it also promises a twist, a sudden reversal that might redeem (or at least explain) the misogyny and amorality of the main character.
Nathan Johnson is so offensively constructed that we hope, as we read the world through his eyes, that the book will twist in a way that inserts some sort of ironic distance between the writer and his character; however, no such distance occurs, and so we are left to assume that no such irony is intended, which makes the experience of reading A Letter Marked Personal both unintentionally-funny and troubling. In an afterword, archivist Bill Dunn informs us that the title character of the book was a composite of Dunleavy himself, and a lingerie businessman he knew in New York. In other words, our wanting to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is an ironic portrait is probably a misplaced hope.
Thinly-projected fantasies
The majority of the novel is given over to “the sweet side of the lingerie business”, by which Donleavy means staring at seminaked women who are inexplicably and exclusively attracted to old men. Or rather, they are thinly-projected fantasies, “ready to open their legs to advance their profession”. The women in this novel are almost entirely two-dimensional, and behave either as sex-obsessed coquettes or as tyrants who divorce rich husbands and fleece them of their property.
When Nathan, who loves his wife so much (as we are told ad nauseam as though this gives him some sort of moral credence) buys her a multimillion dollar castle, she responds by saying: “Nathan, I simply have not got words to say it again. But this is the happiest day of my life. If all these funny doors can be locked, and nobody is going to see us, let’s have a f**k right here and now. Put that gorgeous table to use. I’ll bend over it.”
Nathan’s young, beautiful employee, a girl named Iowa, unironically calls him “pops”, and speaks like a sex robot. From the way these female characters talk and behave, in fact, it would appear that JP Donleavy’s entire exposure to the finer sex has been through low-budget softcore pornography.
‘A feminist disease’
In fact, for a book so obsessed with sex, and with women, it knows frighteningly little about them. At one point, Nathan’s wife calls her gynaecologist rather than Nathan’s own doctor, and Nathan shouts at her because he doesn’t have “a feminist disease” (we assume he means “feminine”). When discussing Iowa, who is apparently mixed-race (and as such entails all the stereotypical trappings of exoticism and deep, sorrowful eyes), he explains that he “had yet to discover [her] racial origin except that such a girl so different was bound to combine all the best things in women that he had ever known.” The quotation from Johnny Depp on the book’s cover (a contentious enough choice for an endorsement) goes further to align the novel with a certain form of masculine hubris.
One redeeming feature of the book is that it is, whether knowingly or not, hilarious. It is an alternate world where characters have bizarre motivations, speak as though their mind is programmed in binary code, and the major plot device turns out to have belonged to an almost entirely different plot altogether. By the end, we are almost cheering for the demise of Nathan Johnson. Perhaps we are supposed to feel sympathy for the men in the novel, who are ruthlessly divorced or even attacked by their wives, but I found myself cheering them on.
