Kirkus-Style Review

Title: A Confederacy of Dunces | Author: John Kennedy Toole
Pub Date: 1980 | Page Count: 404 | ISBN: 978-0-80-213020-4 | Publisher: Grove Weidenfeld

A dizzying, increasingly absurd romp around 1960s New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces follows the exploits of Ignatius J. Reilly through odd jobs, failed uprisings, and countless pilfered hot dogs.

Originally published twenty years posthumously, John Kennedy Toole attempts to wedge every social and cultural taboo into 400 pages, beginning with his debatably comedic and insufferable protagonist. Ignatius J. Reilly, a fussy, arrogant, incompetent ex-graduate student, finds himself experiencing his first consequence after indirectly causing his mother to wreck their car. She then insists he find a job to pay for the damage, requiring him to take intermittent pauses from composing his manifesto. This leads to a parade of terribly mismatched jobs, from file clerking at Levy Pants (“perhaps the most disreputable office that he had ever entered”- where he is fired for staging a failed revolt) to manning a hot dog cart (where he eats more hot dogs than he sells). These episodes are interspersed with scenes from the Night of Joy, a seedy, perpetually vacant “glorify cathouse.” Burma Jones, Night of Joy custodian and handyman, alternates between cursing his boss Lana Lee and attempting to sabotage her shady dealings. By the end of the book, these seemingly disjointed storylines converge in a way that would seem far-fetched if not for the book’s already bizarre nature. Dunces is equal parts character study and preposterous farce. Reilly defines this book through his misanthropic eccentricity, although his eccentricity is demonstrated almost entirely through his fatness (“fat bum” “fat white freak” “fat bastard” “Fatty Arbuckle” etc.). This portrayal is not only offensive to fat people, but his characterization itself is completely unhinged from anything in the real world. Then again, nothing in this book shares any semblance to the real world.

Rambling, humorless, and needlessly edgy, the fact that this book won a Pulitzer is, in Ignatius’s words, “an egregious insult to good taste.”