Recommendations
Books Like A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
New Orleans fiction, comic picaresque novels, and books about magnificent self-delusion
If A Confederacy of Dunces delighted you with Ignatius J. Reilly's operatic complaints and the comedy of his various employments in New Orleans, these eight works share its picaresque energy, its delight in a protagonist whose self-image is magnificently at odds with reality, and its sense of a city as a comic ecosystem.
- 1
Buy on AmazonThe Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
Percy's New Orleans novel — Binx Bolling's philosophical search while watching movies; the more ironic, less comic New Orleans novel from the same year (1961); essential reading for the New Orleans literary tradition.
- 2
Buy on AmazonDon Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The ancestor of Ignatius's self-delusion and the grandfather of the comic picaresque — Don Quixote's inability to see the world as it is, and the comedy of the gap between his vision and reality, is Toole's direct model.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne
Sterne's eighteenth-century comedy of a narrator who cannot tell his story without digressing — the formal predecessor of Ignatius's self-justifying rambling; both novels celebrate the garrulous, self-important intelligence as a comic subject.
- 4
Buy on AmazonLucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Amis's British comic novel of a junior lecturer's battle against academic pomposity — the British version of Ignatius's predicament; both protagonists are hostile to the world they're forced to inhabit and react with operatic contempt.
- 5
Buy on AmazonWise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor's grotesque New Orleans/Tennessee novel — the theological version of Ignatius's predicament; both characters are driven by an inner conviction wildly at odds with the world they inhabit.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's picaresque Chicago novel — Augie's search for a worthwhile fate across a series of engagements with people who want to impose their version of his destiny; the American picaresque tradition from which Confederacy of Dunces descends.
- 7
Buy on AmazonMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
by John Berendt
Berendt's nonfiction account of a Savannah murder — the Southern Gothic city as a world of eccentric characters and extraordinary social rituals; the documentary version of the New Orleans world Toole renders in comedy.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Neon Bible
by John Kennedy Toole
Toole's posthumously published first novel — darker and less exuberant than Confederacy of Dunces; a Southern Gothic coming-of-age that shows the more serious register behind the comedy.
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