First published 1994
Ignatius J. Reilly doesn't fit anywhere. Massively overweight, philosophically verbose, and perpetually aggrieved, he lives with his mother in a crumbling New Orleans house. When financial desperation forces him into the workforce, Ignatius stumbles through a series of increasingly absurd jobs—hot dog vendor, filing clerk, movie theater worker—each encounter revealing his spectacular incompetence and baroque worldview. His mother, alternately exasperated and protective, watches her son's spectacular failures while local characters circle like vultures. Ignatius' grandiose intellectual pretensions clash brutally with working-class reality, generating comic friction that threatens to destroy his fragile domestic ecosystem. His elaborate philosophical manifestos and medieval obsessions provide zero protection against mounting economic and social pressures. As New Orleans churns around him, Ignatius becomes a reluctant participant in a world he despises—each humiliation pushing him closer to an inevitable confrontation between his delusions and brutal reality.
Genres: fiction, satire, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, comedy
Vibes: darkly-humorous, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: New Orleans
Period: 1960s
162 pages · Paperback · Grove Press