Unquestionably the finest novel by a sixteen-year-old that you will ever read. It's a remarkably well-detailed and emotional evocation of small-town life in the American South in the late 1940s. Later to be followed by the scathingly-satirical and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole's first novel contains echoes of such other great Southern writers as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. Simply, yet powerfully told, this novel will both surprise and amaze you. It will probably even make you a little bit envious of its young author's talents.