A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once So enters one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction. The hero of John Kennedy Toole’s incomparable, Pultizer Prize–winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese,...