A Confederacy of Dunces
A posthumous comic masterpiece, rejected by every publisher in Toole's lifetime and pushed into print only by his mother's decade-long crusade, then awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, is one of the great grotesques of American literature: a medieval-minded, valve-obsessed glutton railing against the twentieth century from his mother's house in New Orleans. Walker Percy, who wrote the foreword, called it a gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy and confessed he kept expecting it to fall apart and it never did. The book endures as the definitive novel of the city, equal parts Rabelais, Don Quixote, and the failed crank as holy fool.
"Has there ever been a more annoying, obnoxious character in literature?" one reader asks, because Ignatius never changes, page one to page four hundred, a premise another compresses to "whining is funny, and doing things is bad." The comedy leans hard on the valve, the flatulence, an early bedroom scene involving a dog that functions as an exit door for plenty of readers; one describes getting "lost in all the insults, descriptions of bodily functions, and crude humor." Book clubs split on gender lines, which makes all the awards the book received an unsolved puzzle for those who felt this book was a waste of their time.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
