The Imitation of Patsy Burke

Below is the Kirkus review of THE IMITATION OF PATSY BURKE"Booze, brawls, sex and schizophrenia-such is the artist's life in Paris, according to this raucous satire. When Patsy Burke, a world-famous Irish sculptor living in France, wakes up in his hotel with his body torn and bloody and no recollection of how it got that way, he's not particularly surprised. A raging alcoholic given to beating up pimps in Paris dives, he's used to blackouts and drunk tanks.
Unfortunately, his latest bender has left a dead man in its wake, and Patsy's attempt to piece together what he's been doing for the last few days triggers a reckoning with his past and his demons. Said demons take the form of bickering voices inside his head, including Caravaggio, a Nietzchean figure who eggs on Patsy's fistfights and womanizing; Goody Two-Shoes, a prim woman who castigates his atrocious treatment of friends and lovers; a wispy romantic named Forget Me Not; and a scary demiurge called the Chopper, whose insistent promptings to behead women with a meat cleaver are barely fended off by the remnants of Patsy's sanity.
These clashing personae narrate Patsy's violent picaresque and roiling internal conflicts; he's bombastic, selfish, preening and cynical, yet steeped in Irish-Catholic guilt. (His downward spiral was touched off when he learned that a statue he made of Jesus being sodomized by two monks-meant as a protest against clerical abuses-is now presiding over orgies conducted by Vatican pedophiles.) Patsy's saga is plenty lurid-"You bit off his right ear and you spat it out"-yet the author's pristine prose keeps it under control.
Despite the tale's almost Dantean excesses, Gaynard makes the tone ironic and droll-during an odyssey through the Parisian demimonde, Patsy finds himself discussing Marxist development economics with a glamorous prostitute-and registers delicate shadings of his antihero's psychic travails. The result is an entertaining, over-the-top farce that still draws readers in with pathos. A rich, darkly comic send-up of the art world and the megalomaniacal souls that populate it."