The novel is a long sexual joke with a surprise punch line. It features witty word play, such as referring to writers as having thin pencils, and frequent sexual encounters. The account of Yasmin's many seductions of the brilliant and famous becomes tedious, which Dahl seems to recognize when he stops the accounts and simply summarizes much of what Yasmin does before visiting the King of Norway in her last, nearly disastrous attempt at seduction.

The novel is supposedly taken from Oswald's diaries, and thus it is told primarily in the first person by Oswald himself. Oswald does not take his adventures seriously; he regards his life as an inconsequential search for pleasure. He merrily leads his readers on a shaggy dog story, promising to tell them how he became rich and then spending nearly all the novel telling them a story of how he did not become...