The best literary fiction that made me laugh out loud

I received a copy of this book as a gift on my eleventh birthday, and by the time I’d finished reading it, I had decided to become a writer. What seems at first to be a simply-written series of reminiscences from Thurber’s boyhood in Columbus, Ohio is in fact a fake (or at least exaggeration-filled) memoir, full of tales about charmingly addled characters and unlikely incidents. The chapter entitled “The Dog that Bit People” is my personal favorite.

I bought an English version of this French novel about Paris while actually in that city as a starving backpacker, and have forever associated the wacky joyfulness of the book with the pleasures of that trip. Originally written in a high-energy, idiomatic, slangy, bawdy version of French that scandalized many conservative readers, the plot involves a young country girl named Zazie, obsessed with the Parisian subway system called the Metro, though she’s never seen it. Finally allowed to visit her uncle in the city, she is outraged to find the Metro closed, its workers on strike. She runs away, roaming the crowded city streets, her hilarious extended tantrum not only upsetting her befuddled uncle’s safe and settled lifestyle, but also spreading a generalized craziness throughout Paris. 

I studied the post-modernists in college, and find Barthelme to be the funniest and most likable of that group. His collection of short fiction, Sixty Stories, is my desert island book, but he also wrote a few novels that I like, especially The Dead Father. The dead father looms large in the ethos of his society, and is also literally big—3,200 cubits long. And the dead father is not really dead—though all agree he’s past his prime. So, a road trip is organized: nineteen of his followers attach a cable to drag the massive, complaining figure to a cliff at the edge of the world. A truly witty and absurd little book.

Unfortunately, the author of A Confederacy of Dunces was not able to get the novel published in his lifetime (a struggle I relate to), but that tragedy should not detract from the deep comic pleasure this book provides readers. Its main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is an obese, thirty-year-old, well-educated, incorrigibly lazy man living with his eccentric mother in 1960’s New Orleans. Finally forced by circumstance to seek employment, Ignatius has a series of bizarre adventures while interacting with some truly colorful characters in the French Quarter of that city. From first page to last, I think this may be the most consistently funny novel ever written.

I belong to writers’ group headed by George Saunders, and I’m pleased to report he is just as intelligent, funny, and kind-hearted off the page as on. Although he wrote an acclaimed novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, George is still known best for his long career as a writer of funny and empathic short fiction. Any collection of his stories might be recommended, but my favorite is Tenth of December. The title story, in my view, is a masterful achievement, evidence of America’s best writer working at the top of his game.