Whatever happened to the literary hero who looked and sounded like a hero: noble of brow, pure of heart, righteous in motivation? Hail, today, the craven coward. The title, incidentally, is a misleading bit of allegory. A down-at-the-heels World War II veteran--twice-failed in more conventional small business enterprises--Pat Fegan still has enough native shrewdness in to recognize the ingredients of the Great American Dream when they fall into his lap: buying up at bargain prices slum properties being abandoned by other whites in the face of a tidal wave of Southern blacks inundating Los Angeles after the war.
And then, from that, the acquisition of another property, and then another, and then another. And yet, as Fegan becomes increasingly frustrated with his parasitic family in their comfortable San Fernando Valley home, he is being drawn ever closer, spiritually at least, to the very people that he is victimizing. It is Reggie.
And a curious friendship it is between this middle-age slumlord and the similarly middle-age black homosexual. Two men with absolutely nothing in common. Increasingly, Fegan turns away from his family and devotes more and more time, on site, to overseeing his properties and to a brief but comforting affair with plump year-old Mable Nix, one of his black tenants who, in time, drifts back to her jailed lover.
Now aging prematurely and beginning to lose his grip on reality, Fegan yields to family pressures and begins to sell off his property except for three hunched-together frame buildings, including his old office with its front porch where he can sit and rock and watch the blacks move out and the Latinos move in. Now, when he wanders off in his befuddlement, the child who takes him by the hand and leads him back to safety is brown, not black.
As author Dahl paints him, Pat Fegan is no better than he has to be but, perhaps, no worse, either. There were--and, today, still are--slumlords that are easier to hate.
