Almost 20 years ago, before Ken Kesey's McMurphy, before Joseph Heller's Yossarian, "Dangerfield Lives" was on blackboards and toilet walls. Sebastian Dangerfield had scurried out of "The Ginger Man," J. P. Donleavy's first novel, into existence as the patron cad of the collegiate underground. His latest hero, Reginald Darcy Thormond Dancer Kildare, will never make the graffiti. The Donleavy hero hasn't grown up, just become more respectable, the gentleman Dangerfield pretended to be in his homemade Trinity College rowing blues. Darcy Dancer lives, all right, but he is contained in this novel, where he won't be inspiring belief and attracting followers.

Create a cult hero and readers expect another one every time out or mistake their attraction for high art. So novels since "The Ginger Man" have been occasions to bemoan Donleavy's revisionism or debilities. But "The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman" is not very different in quality from that first novel, when it is re-read and not just fondly remembered. While sensibility is sharper in "The Ginger Man," it and "Darcy Dancer," along with Donleavy's five other novels, are essentially literate entertainments, unpretentious picaresques with flaws that shouldn't be taken any more seriously than their pleasures. Repetition, simplemindedness, even sentimentality are evident in Donleavy's previous works and here in "The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman," too; they are part of the deal we have to make for the comedy and stutter-step prose. Like an ice show or circus, it's a good deal every two or three years. ("The Onion Eaters" excepted.)…

"The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman" is a bildungsroman, though the succession of japes and scrapes makes one forget it. (p. 15)

In Donleavy's world luck and coincidence are destiny; energy rules. Places are pictures and names are jokes. The self is "I" one minute, "he" the next. Aristocratic codes are fabricated for the fun Donleavy has turning them against gentry and peasants alike. Property, food, drink and talk are the certainties. Especially talk: the humped syntax of farmers; the ecclesiastical intonations of retainers; the pukka formality of aristocrats—all are deflated by their own long hiss or the carefully chosen vulgarity.

Darcy's early moonings are just silly, but his reveries while being chased by huntsmen or while making love have a fine comic irrelevance, a mixture of accents and odd perceptions. The big set pieces go off well. (p. 20)