Night of Joy got genuine color peoples workin below the minimal wage. Stop and come stick your ass on a Night of Joy stool. (Here we meet grandly funny Burma Jones, an unwilling black janitor and sidewalk shill: ''Hey! All you peoples draggin along here. Next he's a hot-dog vendor, and then events take an indescribable spiraling turn involving pornographic pictures, a libel suit against Levy Pants, an old Bronx girlfriend of Ignatius', a woeful undercover cop, and a sleazy bar. Shocked, Ignatius organizes a ''Crusade for Moorish Dignity'' to better the black workers' plight-and that's the end of that job. And his first job is at a hopeless clothing factory, Levy Pants, where the bookkeeper is senile (''Am I retired yet?'' she every so often asks no one in particular) and where the black factory workers use the machines for home sewing, since no one actually buys Levy Pants. Mother Reilly, however, backs him into another try at employment. Fastidious slob, rhetorical wreck in excellsis, Ignatius was once a grad student-but the trauma of a ride on a Greyhound Scenicruiser to Baton Rouge for a teaching-job interview has sworn him off work ever since. He's huge and obese, he lives with his widowed dipso mother in a ramshackle New Orleans half-house. Nut, virgin and lute player, writer-down of maledictions against contemporary society (in Big Chief writing tablets), owner of an erratic pyloric valve that gives him ''bloat,'' wearer of desert boots, tweeds, and a green hunting cap with flaps. Reilly-reader of Boethius and drinker of bottle after bottle of Dr. A masterpiece of character comedy finally published more than ten years after its writing, thanks to novelist Walker Percy-who furnishes a foreword.

A confederacy of dunce's