As a satire on the American funeral industry A Fairy Tale of New York joins several distinguished modern novels by Englishmen during this century.

Aldous Huxley's After Many A Summer Dies the Swan (1939) and Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, like Donleavy's book effectively satirize the euphemism, the morbidity, and the ostentation of the American way of death. The funniest scene, in which Christian faints upon his initiation to the embalming room, is hoisted onto the table, and wakes up wondering exactly what everyone is doing to him, is of the order of Waugh's Juvenalian satire.

Although critic John Harrington recalls The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan because of the hero's name and the series of episodic adventures that test his character, the books does not really represent Christian as so much tempted as exploitative of the situations that surround and threaten to...