by Bill Ross
I first encountered Ignatius J. Reilly in 1980. I had just begun my first professional job, as a library cataloger at the American University in Washington, DC. My wife, Pat, has always been a voracious reader of fiction, but in my mind I was an academic and had no time to novels; I had more substantive things to read.
As I learned my job, I realized that my department head quietly emphasized statistics and that fiction was generally easy to catalog than non-fiction. In addition, I figured I could pad my statistics by cataloging books that didn’t interest me, so I wouldn’t linger over them. But then it happened.
On what I picture as a crisp fall day, I picked up a piece of new fiction, A Confederacy of Dunces, but it was not like any other piece of fiction. For one, it was published by the Louisiana State University Press and back then, academic presses wouldn’t touch fiction. And secondly, it was a novel by a dead author about New Orleans, a city that I didn’t particularly care for. The figure on the dust jacket reminded my brother and the encapsulated descriptions of both the author and book pulled me in. I had the book rushed through processing and took it home. Pat was flabbergasted.
I devoured it. I laughed out loud. The characters were wonderfully wacky. The dialog was authentic and crazed, all at the same time. I recommended it to everyone I knew.
It sounds trite, but it changed my life as a reader. For the next decade, I made up for lost time. I read fiction non-stop, from Cooper and Melville and Twain to the “Beats” and other contemporary authors; and I read just about everything in between. Since then, work and family have tempered my mania and I have found a happy balance between fiction and non-fiction.
Ignatius changed me and I didn’t forget it, but I never went back to it; that is, until 1993. In that year, the Society of American Archivists held its annual conference in New Orleans and I signed up for a pre-conference workshop on photographic preservation. I was going back to a city that I had mixed feelings about — for an entire week!
Some nagging little voice made me pull A Confederacy of Dunces from my overstuffed bookshelf. When I boarded my flight, I had it in hand. Before I got to Pittsburgh, I was far into the novel. During my layover in Pittsburgh, I picked at my lunch while I continued to read. By the time I got to Louis Armstrong airport, I had finished it and it was as satisfying as the first time.
I stayed in an old, but newly-renovated hotel a block off of Bourbon Street. My room had 12 foot ceilings and a balcony that overlooked a courtyard centered by a working fountain, surrounded by banana trees and cascades of flowers. After Ignatius, I saw the city through different eyes.
I drank café au lait and ate beignets at Café du Monde. I took a cab out to the Seventh Ward to Chez Helene and devoured the late Austin Leslie’s incredible fried chicken, red beans and rice, and collard greens. I heard the music in the language and I found meaning in the music; and I recognized the buildings and doorways and ironwork and gardens that the fictional Ignatius passed while pushing his hotdog cart through the narrow streets.
I’ve returned to New Orleans four times since then and each time I try to re-read John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel. It is not a novel that any chamber of commerce would welcome, but it forever changed my reading habits and encouraged me to look at the complicated and contradictory mess that is New Orleans in a whole new light. And it reminded me that it is easy to love the perfect; the truer test comes in loving the imperfect.
In other words: it altered the course of my life.
Thanks Ignatius.
Posted by Rachel Gogan 
Posted by Rachel Gogan 
Posted by Rachel Gogan 
