Joseph Andrews

When Joseph Andrews, a footman of sterling virtue, resigns from Lady Booby's household and sets out to walk home to the countryside, he has no idea how many pairs of hungry eyes will follow him. The lady herself has just discovered that her new servant's purity makes him dangerous to her composure, and so begins Joseph's odyssey through an England teeming with rogues, squirearchs, seducers, and one gloriously oblivious clergyman. Enter Abraham Adams, the absent-minded parson who becomes Joseph's companion and foil: a man of genuine goodness whose scholarly wool-headedness lands them both in increasingly absurd predicaments. Published in 1742 as a comic romance, Fielding's debut is really a magnificent cheek, a parody of the sentimental novels flooding the market (especially Richardson's Pamela) that somehow manages to be both a brilliant spoof and a sincere defense of actual virtue. The road to Joseph's home is paved with false accusations, stolen clothes, mistaken identities, and lecherous aristocrats, but also with unexpected kindnesses and steadfast friendship. It is picaresque fiction at its most alive: funny, sharp, and surprisingly tender about the way people fail each other and occasionally, wonderfully, do not.