The other characters in The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms are plausible enough for Donleavy's purposes, but only Jocelyn, the Lady of the tide, is a fully developed person. Her husband is a reduced version of the ginger men whose self-centered antics have captivated readers in other novels. He is devastatingly dismissed as an "homme nul" by a Frenchman. Her children appear briefly before their "permanently last visit" as ungrateful wretches. The husband of one of her "friends" attempts to seduce her in a hilarious scene where Jocelyn reveals the true nature of loveless lust as a pecuniary transaction, exposing him as another deteriorating ginger man. The people she turns to for financial or psychological assistance are hucksters fluent in various forms of the language of persuasion and deception. Only the genuinely gentlemanly representative of an old law firm behaves with any kind of honesty or decorum, and...