A Confederacy of Dunces is about a gross, obese, gluttonous, half-mad, thirty-year-old slob, named Ignatius O'Reilly. Ignatius considers himself a genius, and he feels out of place in modern society, which he sees as a conspiracy designed to offend him. He dubs this conspiracy "A Confederacy of Dunces," borrowing the phrase from Jonathan Swift. Ignatius lives shabbily in New Orleans, with his alcoholic, dim-witted mother, who repeatedly subjects him to the ultimate indignity of going to work for a living. Most of the novel consists of his misadventures at several jobs (he sells the world's foulest hot dogs but eats all the merchandise), his run-ins with the people he meets, and his tirades against the outrages of modern life. He rages in inflated, oratory, florid language at whatever displeases him; nearly everything displeases him.

Readers may be surprised to realize the novel's story occurs in 1962, so...