Set in turn-of-the-century Dublin, The Hard Life is a satirical Bildungsroman that deals with the education and upbringing of the narrator, Finbarr, and his brother Manus.

The novel offers a mocking critique of certain representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, the development of Irish identity and the functioning of formal education.

Finbarr describes Collopy's home as a squalid environment where the boys are served greasy meatballs for dinner, a household with a "dead atmosphere" offering little opportunity for amusement.

Collopy and the parish priest, a German Jesuit domiciled in Dublin and bearing the comical name of Father Fahrt, frequently indulge in long bouts of drinking, and none of the adults exhibits much concern for the child's welfare.

Finbarr's first impression of his school is that it resembles a prison: he describes the horrors of corporal punishment by "the leather" in detail, and refers to "struggling through the wretched homework, cursing Wordsworth and Euclid and Christian doctrine and similar scourges of youth".

He researches information on these subjects in the local library and re-hashes the prose of encyclopedias, writing in a pseudo-intellectual, abstruse style deliberately designed to look impressive but remain incomprehensible.

This business proves extremely successful, and eventually he leaves school and emigrates to London, where he offers a wider range of courses and also develops medicinal remedies to sell.

Early in the novel it appears that the issue holds considerable gravity: it seems to concern women's rights, and Collopy is rallying the Dublin Corporation to implement some kind of change and trying to persuade Father Fahrt to secure the support of the church.

Much of the satirical humour of the book targets the Catholic Church in Ireland and parochial schools: the theological disputes between Father Fahrt and Collopy are ridiculed, and often even the boys correct their misunderstandings.

However, as Anne Clissmann has pointed out, O'Brien remained a faithful Catholic throughout his life and his lampoons can be read as being aimed at particular individuals and practices, rather than against the Church as a whole.

[8] Anne Clissmann (1975) suggests that the "lavatory humour" of the novel quickly loses its appeal and concludes that "The Hard Life is ultimately unsatisfying to read because it lacks coherence and is too one-sided a vision of squalid reality.

Manus makes money and wins friends, but only by deception, and although the novel's conclusion shows Finbarr rejecting this path, it is uncertain how his future will develop.

Sue Asbee suggests that such a comparison is "almost insulting" to Joyce, but accepts that both deal with the squalor of turn-of-the-century Dublin, alcoholism and the power of the Catholic Church.

However, either Manus or O'Brien himself is mistaken: Keats' headstone itself reads "Here lies one whose name was writ in water", a self-lacerating reference to the negative reviews that his poetry received.