Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield and his English wife, Marion, together with their infant daughter, Felicity, are living in Dublin.
Supported by the G.I. Bill and nominally a student of law at Trinity College, Sebastian idles away his time in a continuous spiral of drink, seduction, and deception. He finances his rakehell exploits by sponging on the gullible, stealing or pawning whatever is movable, and conning whomever he can, using his posh accent and college scarf as reference. His wild pranks range from the humorous to the outrageous: fetching home a sheep’s head for dinner, engaging in a furious pub brawl and a hilarious chase among Dublin’s streets, seeing excreta falling through the ceiling in one lodging, hacking through the sewer line in another, even, at one point, attempting to smother Felicity. The cumulative effect of these escapades and the neglect of his daughter (she suffers from rickets) is to wear out the patience of his wife, who finally leaves him for her parents in England. Undeterred by his progressively straitened circumstances, he seduces his tenant, the naive and timid Miss Frost (a frustrated, early-middle-aged florist’s assistant) and carouses among the denizens of Dublin’s bohemia, all the while gleefully eluding a former landlord, Egbert Skully.
His closest companion is a fellow American, Kenneth O’Keefe, who is preoccupied with schemes for the surrender of his virginity, without success. His letters to Dangerfield on his failures with women (and men) in Ireland and France punctuate the story of the hero’s debaucheries until O’Keefe finally returns to the United States. Thus the plot of the
novel is a loose string of harum-scarum adventures of the irrepressible Sebastian as he awaits his father’s death and his own substantial inheritance. Before this happens, he leaves Ireland for London; there, he is pursued by Mary, one of his conquests, for whom he has developed a genuine affection—an inconvenient sentiment, given his overriding commitment to self-gratification.
As hilarious as these adventures are, they are less memorable than the lusty, blasphemous, vibrant imagination of Sebastian as he reflects on the world around him: the seedy side of Dublin life viewed from a material, sensual, American perspective. Much of the novel is taken up with a highly energetic, irreverent, deliciously articulate interior monologue, as Sebastian mentally skewers the shambling, penurious, vacuous Irish he encounters. His occasional bursts of protest—wildly, absurdly violent—often frighten him into a sense of his own futility and doom.
As befits a picaresque novel, the plot is episodic, alternating between domestic scenes, interludes with O’Keefe, and accounts of Sebastian’s three liaisons, with Chris, Mary, and Lily Frost. The narrative is highlighted by several savagely humorous scenes: an uproarious pub brawl, the seduction of Miss Frost, Sebastian’s trashing of Skully’s house, Sebastian’s ride home in the train with his penis exposed. Indeed, one of the achievements of this novel is its scabrous black comedy. Even in the midst of its wildest humor, however, the reader is reminded of the stark reality behind the fun—of Dangerfield’s starving baby, Miss Frost’s ruined reputation, the wanton waste of intelligence, money, and property.