LIT LISTS: Six titles with charming, workshy anti-heroes

Sunday, January 9, 2022

Six titles with charming, workshy anti-heroes

Peter Mann grew up in Kansas City. He teaches history and literature at Stanford and is a past recipient of the Whiting Fellowship. He is also a

graphic artist & cartoonist and draws the online comic The Quixote Syndrome. The Torqued Man is his first novel.

At The Strand Magazine Mann tagged six favorites books featuring charming, if feckless, layabouts, including:

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces:

One of the few works I first read in my early teens and still adore, Toole’s 1980 novel stands or falls with its protagonist Ignatius Reilly—a truculent misanthrope with bowel trouble, living with his mother in New Orleans and fighting a one-man crusade to restore the world to a proper balance of “theology and geometry.”

Ignatius is content to stay in the cozy warmth of his childhood bed, reading Boethius, masturbating into his rubber glove, and writing screeds against modernity; that is until his mother wrecks the family car and he, like Murphy, has no choice but to risk life and limb and get a job. What follows is a picaresque romp of failed employments, from organizing an uprising at a pants factory to eating through his supply as a hotdog vendor. He goes to the movies and screams at the film stars (“Degenerates!”); he attends amateur art openings and decries the paintings (“Abortions!”); wherever he goes, he is a breath of fresh indignation, armed with hair-trigger invective.

Ignatius is by all accounts a right-wing authoritarian crank, but in the days before Trump and the internet he appears far more endearingly quixotic and lovably buffoonish than whoever his more loathsome and decidedly less funny 4chan counterpart would be today (an obese Jordan Peterson? a slovenly Ben Shapiro?). I shudder even to venture a comparison.