As one would expect from the title, the cast of this character-driven novel includes a plethora of imbeciles, crooks, and trainwrecks, but in the protagonist, Toole has created an iconic character who is one of the most outlandish, entertaining, and memorable ever.

Ignatius J. Reilly is lazy, incompetent, condescending, hypocritical, self-entitled, sensitive, dramatic, irascible, intelligent, delusional, self-righteous, judgmental, sadistic, pathetic, offensive, litigious, self-pitying, and sexually repressed. He’s a fat bastard – a