Like True Confessions, Dutch Shea, Jr. is a tale of moral decay in an Irish-American Catholic setting. Its author's gifts lie in the areas of comedy and social observation; he finds sardonic hilarity in the gritty texture of his characters' lives. Dunne is less effective, however, as creator of an adequately motivated protagonist, and his somber theme—the unendurable sadness, cruelty and capriciousness of life in our time—is neither original with him nor organic to his material here. As a result, Dutch Shea, Jr., while a triumph of darkly comic writing, is not a wholly satisfying novel….

Dunne's comic talent is on display throughout the novel. Its gamy dialogue is studded with jokes that are racial, ethnic, sexual or scatological, yet mordantly funny. Many of Dunne's characters, like the pathetic celebrity priest who conducts gourmet pilgrimages to the Catholic shrines of Europe, and the business-like pimp who...