Mad Maundering

By Paul Gray

THE DESTINIES OF DARCY DANCER, GENTLEMAN

by J.P. Donleavy

Delacorte; 402 pages; $9.95

His publisher did not really have to print J.P. Donleavy's name on the dust jacket of this novel. Arch alliteration is a trademark established by the author through a steady succession of Saddest Summers, Beastly Beatitudes and Mad Molecule. Fans and detractors can agree on one point: no one but Donleavy could commit such titles.

His seventh novel is familiar in other ways. The setting is Ireland, scene of the author's most exuberant and successful prose. Reginald Darcy Thormond Dancer Kildare is not another Sebastian Dangerfield, the irrepressible Ginger Man, but one of Donleavy's sensitive young souls. His mother dies when Darcy is young and the lad inherits Andromeda Park, a venerable estate that has seen better days and will see worse. Darcy's absentee father lunges at the inheritance, making his son's life miserable. Sure and it is a long, crowded road that Darcy must travel before his story ends.

Along the way, events and people move like unanchored pinwheels, often to dazzling effect. A cast of odd and deranged servants at Andromeda Park is road-show Hellzapoppin: Darcy informs a new housekeeper, "That is the room where our butlers commit suicide and it is always kept locked." When the hero careers through Dublin's fringes, Donleavy reveals the same skill at catching the city's sights and smells that astonished readers of The Ginger Man 20 years ago.

Such virtues, however, come smothered in blather and blarney. Donleavy has always been among the most mannered of writers, and his habits increasingly seem designed as distractions. He constructs paragraphs as if the Irish government had imposed a tax on verbs. Words.

Sometimes. Alone. Between. Periods. Yet "ands" are cheap: "And Mr. Arland ask ing him why he hadn't seen him having a pint for some time. And the barber stopped cutting my hair and looked up at the ceiling." These repetitions may charm at first as a rendition of the maundering heard in Irish pubs; stretched out over a wad of pages, the trick grows thin. Even the little poems that conclude chapters seem limp: "And/ I loved/ Her." When Lennon and McCartney wrote something like that, they provided music.

This novel is J.P. Donleavy's most sustained effort at social comedy. But his stylistic idiosyncrasies are geared to convey energy rather than reflection. The gaudy array of types who tumble through Dar cy's life are more remarkable than remarked upon. The works of Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh provide an object lesson here: if the subject of a novel is manners, the writer must be on his very best.

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