Books like Charles Portis

Mills shares Portis’s rare ability to make incompetence, repetition, and workplace procedure almost unbearably funny. An English foreman takes charge of two Scottish fence builders whose drinking and evasions steadily defeat his modest plans; he reports each new calamity with the same calm attention Ray Midge gives receipts, mechanical troubles, and other people’s dubious claims.

The comedy gradually acquires a darker, stranger pressure without sacrificing its flat, exact voice. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and now a cult favorite, this is the book for anyone who thinks Portis’s funniest trick is letting a narrator remain serenely practical while reality slips its leash.

If Ray Midge’s obsessive reasoning delighted you—his conviction that sufficient scrutiny will impose order on lunacy—meet Flann O’Brien’s nameless narrator, a scholar consumed by the work of an invented philosopher. A crime sends him into an Irish countryside governed by policemen, bicycles, and explanations of breathtakingly airtight nonsense.

O’Brien is more surreal than Portis, but their comic principle is wonderfully close: no joke is underlined, every mad proposition is defended with bureaucratic precision, and language itself becomes a trapdoor. Neglected after it was written, the novel has become one of the great devotional classics of twentieth-century comic fiction. Its logic is unforgettable; after reading it, ordinary bicycles may never look entirely innocent again.