The novelist's literary technique seemed to emerge full-blown, in its mature artistic form; little he has written since 1955 indicates any artistic growth or development, and novels in which the signature Donleavy techniques are absent or minimized, such as Schultz (1979), indicate how very much these novels depend on their idiosyncratic style for charm. What is in Sebastian Dangerfield a rogue's charm is in Sigmund Franz Schultz mere boorishness. A significant element in this distinction is that these basic Donleavy signatures are minimal or absent in the later novel.

First, following a long tradition that contains the great eighteenth-century comic novelists Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne (with whose Tristram Shandy Donleavy's novels are sometimes compared), The Ginger Man adapts the picaresque comic formula, in which we as readers follow the humorous misadventures of the protagonist over a fairly significant portion of his life. Thus the novel is organized around a...