[At] every point [in "At Swim-Two-Birds"] there are satirical glimpses of Dublin life. If the whole were simple, broad farce, it would soon pall. What transforms it is the great, if often maddening, influence of Irish pedantry—the comedy of hairsplitting—and O'Brien's ear for the nuances of Irish talk: above all, for its self-inflating love of formal utterance and insinuation. His humor … depends on the intricacy of its texture. Language is all: he is a native of a country of grammarians, thriving on the perplexities of a mixed culture, and creating, as Joyce did, vulgar or scholarly myths.

To say this is not to underrate O'Brien's superb invention in broad farce—in, say, "The Hard Life."… O'Brien's extravagant mock encounters with Joyce (who is heard saying that "Ulysses" was smut written by American academics) and with Keats and Chapman paralytically drunk in a pub after closing time (when the landlord has to declare that the illegal drinkers are all his uncles and nieces) are fun of a journalistic order. (pp. 153-54)

The curious theme of death kept at bay by the invention of conceits underlies "The Third Policeman," the posthumously published version of the early novel that had failed. It seems to have begun as a mock detective story, in which the author is forced to commit an appalling murder by a man who has enslaved him and robbed him of his property. This is a dark and disturbing tale. O'Brien's work is rich in distracting episodes, and here we come upon a conceit that seems to point to something obsessive in his inward-turning mind. The conceit reminds one of Borges and of those figures who multiply in a series of reflections in retreating mirrors. In O'Brien, the object is a box that contains a box containing boxes, getting infinitely smaller, until they are invisible. It seems that O'Brien put off doom by retreating into a metaphysical solitude. But the scene becomes macabre. Ridiculous policemen arrive. The narrator is arrested and hears being built, plank by plank, the scaffold on which he will be hanged. Bicycles—another of O'Brien's obsessive subjects—confuse the tale, for the cannot resist an idea. But there is no doubt of his laughter and unnerving melancholy. (pp. 154, 157)