Ignatius is one of the most original characters in American fiction, and your whole experience of the book depends on how you take him. He is monstrous, a self-appointed genius in a green hunting cap who quotes Boethius, blames his every failure on Fortuna's wheel, and treats hot dog carts and movie theaters as affronts to civilization. He is also, against all odds, hilarious. Toole gives him a voice of such grandiose, deluded eloquence that you laugh even as you wince, and the plot, which sends Ignatius lurching from one disastrous job to another across 1960s New Orleans, exists mainly to set this human catastrophe loose on the world.
What keeps the comedy from curdling is the city around him. The novel is gloriously overstuffed with vivid secondary players: Ignatius's long-suffering mother, a sharp-tongued bar owner, an exhausted patrolman, a put-upon factory worker, a sly stripper with a trained cockatoo. Toole choreographs their separate storylines like a farceur, letting coincidences and schemes pile up until they crash together in a finale of pure comic mayhem. The dialect is rich and exact, the sense of place so strong you can practically smell the Quarter, and almost every minor character gets a moment of real humanity amid the slapstick.
The honest caveat is Ignatius himself. He is deliberately insufferable, and the humor is broad, scatological, and relentless; spend four hundred pages with a narrator this grandiose and self-pitying and some readers will tire of him well before the end. The 1960s setting also carries period attitudes the book mostly plays for satire but doesn't always interrogate. This is high farce, not subtle realism, and it asks you to laugh at a deeply unpleasant man for a long stretch.
If that bargain appeals, the rewards are huge. The set pieces are genuinely uproarious, the language is a constant delight, and beneath the buffoonery is a sneaky tenderness toward all these striving, deluded people. It's the kind of comedy that earns its laughs honestly and then sticks with you.
Why you should read
- Great if you love big, broad, character-driven comedy
- Great if you enjoy a richly drawn sense of place
- Great if a gloriously awful protagonist sounds fun
- Great if you want a comic classic with real bite
What to expect
- An insufferable, grandiose, very funny central character
- Broad, scatological humor played at full volume
- A large cast and farcical converging storylines
- Vivid 1960s New Orleans atmosphere and dialect
There's a real craft to how Toole builds the chaos, too. Each subplot is set spinning early and then nudged, scene by scene, toward a collision the reader can see coming long before the characters do, which turns the back half into a kind of comic suspense, watching the dominoes line up and bracing for the fall. He's also a sneaky satirist of his moment, skewering self-help, academia, do-gooder reformers, and corporate work with equal glee, and using Ignatius's deranged commentary as a funhouse mirror held up to the whole culture. The book was famously published only after the author's death, championed by his mother and the novelist Walker Percy, and that backstory has become part of its legend, but the comedy needs no legend to land. It won a posthumous Pulitzer for a reason, and it remains a singular, joyously funny classic. Come for Ignatius and his green hunting cap; stay for the whole gorgeous, chaotic, unmistakably New Orleans circus he sets spinning.
