The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B

The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B is the third full-length novel by Irish American writer J. P. Donleavy and follows the picaresque experiences of the eponymous character from his birth into his mid-twenties.

He is shipped off to a British boarding school, where he makes a lasting friendship with Beefy, a similarly displaced laird, who is eventually expelled.

But while their marriage is happy, Millicent leaves Balthazar on discovering his enduring love for Elizabeth Fitzdare, taking their son with her.

At the end, having paid a visit to Elizabeth's grave to make his farewell, Balthazar is called back to Paris for his mother's funeral.

[4] Donleavy's trademark writing is described as "an intricate prose style characterized by minimal punctuation, strings of sentence fragments, frequent shifts of tense, and lapses from standard third-person narration into first-person stream of consciousness,"[5] and was particularly appreciated.

John Deedy, writing in Commonweal, praised the first hundred pages (of the book's 400) but then found the Trinity College episodes "warmed-over Ginger Man", only excepting the Fitzdare romance; everything after her disappearance struck him as disappointing.