Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The story is set in New Orleans in the early 1960s. The story revolves around Ignatius J. Reilly, an odd, educated but slothful man still living with his mother at age 30 in the city's Uptown neighborhood. During an outing with is mother is almost arrested and during their escape they hide out in a bar/strip club. After a few drinks his mother runs her car into a building. When they get the bill for $20,000 Mrs. Irene Reilly insists Ignatius get a job to help pay for damages. In his quest for employment he has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters. He nemesis is Mryna Minkoff, who through correspondence both try to impress one another by starting riots and various other altercations with various religious, ethnic and sexual orientation groups.

We see other sides of the story by various characters Ignatius encounters during his quest.

Lana Lee owns the strip club/bar in French Quarter, where Ignatius and his mother hide out in. She hires Burma Jones for under minimum wage and he plans his revenge by enticing Ignatius back into the bar. We meet Jones in the first few chapters when Claude Robichaux meets him in the local jail.

The first job that Ignatius gets is at Levy Pants own by Gus Levy and his wife Mrs. Levy. Gus and his wife live a life in which they absolutely hate each other but love their wealth and status more. Their life is at a totally different level of living, yet are they any better than Ignatius? I love how we get these detail descriptions of the luxury of Levy and his wife. Mrs. Levy has also made it her pet project to protect Miss Trixie, a very elderly senial woman who only wants to retire from Levy Pants.

Some of the funniest scenes are when Ignatius is at the movies and screams out his displeasure of how the acting or storyline is going. It is absolutely hilarious. He also has this habit of screaming "Oh, my God!" when he can't believe what he is hearing and/or seeing.

During the first part of the book, Irene Riley seems like a flat, screechy drunk of a mother. But as she evolves and makes relationships with other she becomes a person who wants her own identity and is tired of living her life for her son who will never leave. She finds herself a boyfriend, Claude Robichaux, a much older Jewish man who is constantly on the look out for communists. Claude is introduced in the first few pages of the book when he is arrested instead of Ignatius by a local policemen, Angelo Mancuso. Poor Angelo, after making several wrong arrests, the sergeant in charge gets fed up with him, and in punishment Angelo is reduced to wearing ridiculous disguises, and spending time in the bus station toilets in order to arrest "suspicious characters". He ends up saving the day by busting a pornography ring.

Sad but interesting side note:
The author, John Kennedy Toole, was born in New Orleans in 1937. He received a master's degree in English from Columbia University and taught at Hunter College and at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early sixties and tried unsuccessfully to get the novel published; depressed, at least in part by his failure to place the book, he committed suicide in 1969. It was only through the tenacity of his mother that her son's book was eventually published and found the audience it deserved. His long-suppressed novel The Neon Bible, written when he was only sixteen, was eventually published as well. A Confederacy of Dunces won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

I actually listened to this on CD while driving around and found myself laughing outloud. I did have to be in the mood for it so it took me awhile to get into it. I did enjoy the reader as he did a good job with all the accents.