It is difficult to write a life-affirming novel nowadays: too much is known about the tawdriness and shams of almost all levels of society, and a novel that does not have a social context is exposed to the sterilising rays of subjectivity. It is J. P. Donleavy's great achievement to have created both a style of writing and a subject-matter [in The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman] that are exuberantly in praise of life, and yet not too fantastical to seem true….

J. P. Donleavy's last book was the extremely funny The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners: this new novel is an even funnier (and much more touching) illustration of this code. It is picaresque in that it rambles on in the manner of some 18th-century novel about rogues: sometimes its extravagances drop over into the realm of fantasy. But what seem to me to be truly and uniquely life-affirming about it are the connections that exist between the story, the style, and what life seems to be about.

In Donleavy's writing there is an almost magically potent blend of the vulgar and the elegant, the grotesque and the lyrical, the archaic and the lewdly up-to-date. The vulgarity is part of the stuff of life: what is also part of life is the elegance and nobility with which human beings can, sometimes, handle the other, darker part—can come to terms with it and even love it. These opposites are held together in Mr Donleavy's writing in the person of the narrator in a quite self-conscious way: the narrator writes of himself now in the first person and now in the third—as if he were naturally aware of himself as in part foolish and helpless, and in part detached and with some possibilities of control. His sentences, his repartee, in the way they bring the vulgar and the elegant together, are often weirdly witty—as if in this there is authority and potency. Other characters with whom he has sympathy come to talk in his style: it is as if life-affirmation were held in an elaborate network of human wittiness….

Donleavy ends each of his chapters with one of those brief four- or six-line poems that have become a hallmark of his writing. These, too, seem to be distillations, like pearls or tears, of all the stresses and strains that have gone before. They seem to say: in life, there is a lot of dross, yes; there are also small bits of gold and diamond, which, if you find them, are worth more than all the rest put together.