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...