Books like The Confidence-Man
Years later, one returns to The Confidence-Man because its jokes never settle into reassurance: every voice may be selling something, every moral principle may be a disguise, and even the reader’s wish to understand becomes another form of credulity. These three novels turn that same unease into very different kinds of pleasure.
If you liked The Confidence-Man, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Confidence-Man, and we tell you exactly what.
JR is the great American novel of talk as a form of counterfeit currency. Its pages are dominated by barely attributed dialogue—sales pitches, telephone calls, evasions, jargon—and Gaddis makes you identify speakers and motives without a trustworthy guide. As in Melville, language meant to establish confidence instead exposes how thoroughly confidence has become a commodity.
The comedy begins with an eleven-year-old discovering that modern finance can be manipulated almost entirely through words and paperwork. From there, the novel’s accumulating voices create a society in which nobody quite controls the system, though nearly everyone is trying to exploit it. Winner of the National Book Award and fiercely cherished by readers willing to meet its formal demands, JR offers the rare experience of learning how to hear a whole civilization lying to itself.
Brás Cubas begins by informing us that he is dead, then treats the freedom of posthumous narration as a license to charm, tease, contradict, and implicate us. His tiny chapters, abrupt digressions, typographical jokes, and confidential addresses to the reader make the book feel less like a conventional story than an intimate performance by a man whose candor may be his cleverest vanity.
Machado’s irony is exquisitely unstable: Brás exposes the selfishness of his class while continually revealing more than he intends about himself. The result is funny, elegant, and morally merciless without ever becoming doctrinaire. Long recognized as a masterpiece of Brazilian literature, it now has devoted readers worldwide—and anyone who relishes Melville’s refusal to separate philosophical inquiry from mischief should regard it as indispensable.
Diderot makes storytelling itself into a confidence game. Jacques and his master travel, argue about freedom and necessity, exchange stories, interrupt one another, and repeatedly find their tale commandeered by a narrator who taunts the reader with alternative possibilities. Every promise of narrative satisfaction becomes an occasion to ask why we trusted the promise in the first place.
Yet the book is not a dry metafictional exercise. It is quick, bawdy, warm, combative, and alive to the shifting power between servant and master, speaker and listener, author and audience. Its radical playfulness helped open possibilities later exploited by Sterne, Melville, and modern experimental fiction. Reading it reveals that the novel has been disputing its own authority—and laughing at our hunger to believe it—since long before postmodernism acquired a name.