Books: All Over the Blooming Place

A SINGULAR MAN by J. P. Donleavy. 402 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $6.

James Joyce did a terrible thing for a whole generation of writers when he put that tape recorder inside the skull of Leopold Bloom. James Patrick Donleavy, a Dublin-educated New York novelist, ran off a lively spool or two in a novel called The Ginger Man, a picaresque tale of low life and high philosophy in Dublin's slums. He has now reverted to tape in a second novel, this one called A Singular Man, whose hero, equipped with the Joyce instant-playback brain, goes...

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