[A Confederacy of Dunces] is a corker. It is a gross farce, a blustering satire, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book that begins with a solitary fat man but quickly picks up cops and B-girls, clerks and capitalists, most of the "deviates" and "degenerates" of the French Quarter of New Orleans, and keeps right on gathering momentum until it sweeps away everything, including that most innocent of bystanders, the reader, in its path….

[Ignatius] is writing a history of western civilization: "With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy." This mighty work is a repudiation of the modern age, which has treated Ignatius so badly that his pyloric valve regularly snaps shut and fills his stomach with trapped gas. (p. 1)

[The plot] is absurd, perfectly absurd, but it is also perfectly inevitable.

One of the...