[There's] such a swirl of mostly fantastic activity inside [At Swim-Two-Birds] that the external torpor of the nameless [lie-abed] novelist is more than justified. But of course none of this is visible to the [author's mean-spirited] uncle, any more than the various marks by which the book's characters are distinguished are apparent to readers for whom the author hasn't bothered to describe them. O'Brien seems to have put some effort into the ancient wheeze that language was given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.

Much as he resembles Beckett's figure of Murphy, who was born just the year before, O'Brien's somnolent author is not yet psychotic, he is simply distracted. The Greek motto at the head of the book declares that "All things naturally draw apart," and under the analytic gaze of the author (who helpfully provides many sections of his book with solemn descriptions of their rhetorical modes), that's exactly what they do…. The hero of the book is not the story,… partly because O'Brien sets so many stories going, and the characters involved in them start so many counter-stories, that none of them really gets told. Here language itself is the hero or villain, language which is able not only to transform and then reflect itself, but to give events and ideas and objects instantaneous new characters—often in a surprisingly literal sense. Language itself is the first mover, under whose impulse "all things naturally draw apart." (pp. 187-88)

As the innermost story collapses, the outer ones are resolved: sweetness and light seem to prevail. But the Conclusion of the book, ultimate, which the author appends, is a curious and very beautiful prose poem after the manner of Robert Burton, on the fragility of the human mind, its frightful susceptibility to its own idées fixes. Two images predominate: Mad Sweeny, a prophetic bag of bones hung in a tree between heaven and earth like a starved bird or a sibyl, listens to the barking of dogs, a creaturely noise that only deepens his sense of the infinite immensity of space: and a man run mad on the number three goes home and cuts his throat three times, scrawling with his blood on the mirror a last note to his wife, "good bye, good bye, good bye." As an ending to a comic novel, it is as grim a passage as the ending of The Sound and the Fury, which is also a novel about the mind's inability to keep things from falling apart.

At Swim-Two-Birds is a Joycean novel, but it's Irish as well, and fantastic in addition; there's no way of saying very clearly where one element leaves off and the other begins. The trial scene, the burlesques of epic tradition, and the derisive report of a learned conversation between three villainous pub-crawlers (they are as full of solemn, disjointed, useless miscellaneous information as the "Ithaca" section of Ulysses) are among the passages that stand out as directly derivative. Then there's an area where without the Joycean precedent O'Brien perhaps wouldn't have written just as he did, but where the resemblance is too general to justify talk about "influence." The knack of rendering colloquial speech is only to be picked up by listening to colloquial speech, but with Ulysses beside him, O'Brien evidently found certain rhythms and certain hard, funny vulgarisms within easy range of his discourse, as earlier practitioners of vulgar Irish English had not. The contemptuous hash made of narrative, the drying out of description, the intrusion of the author as stylistic manipulator—all these conventions, with some others, mark O'Brien as a post-Joyce if not wholly propter-Joyce writer. The elements of fun and play are purer in him than in Joyce, the labyrinth of the author's language is less intricate and perhaps less oppressive: for all its illusionistic entanglements, the story comes closer to being a story than anything in Joyce. But the evidence of influence is too strong to need further emphasis. (pp. 189-90)