Throughout much of Donleavy's fiction since The Ginger Man (1955), there has been a constant tension between America and Europe, specifically between Ireland with its repressive religiosity and New York with its bigness and commercialism. In this book Donleavy revisits this notion by tracing the adventures of Cornelius Christian as he returns from Ireland where he, like Dangerfield and Donleavy, studied. Christian is placed in the difficult position of earning a living because of his wife's death on the crossing and the consequent debt he runs up in burying Helen. Hired by the undertaker because of his manners and class, Christian encounters the American variation on the Irish repressiveness Donleavy satirized in The Ginger Man. In his essay "An Expatriate Looks at America," published three years after A Fairy Tale of New York, Donleavy accuses America of exaggerating vices inherent in the human condition: "like anywhere, greed...