A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

I finished this book a few months ago.  A used paperback version was on my shelf, the result of consulting a 2016 BuzzFeed list of “31 Books You Need To Read if You Want To Understand the South” when stocking the shelves here for vacation rental. 

            The first interesting thing about this book is its history, as told in the Foreward by Walker Percy:

While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me.  What she proposed was preposterous.  It was not that she had written a couple chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class.  It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it.  Why would I want to do that? I asked her.  Because it is a great novel, she said.

            Louisiana State University Press published the novel in 1980.  The people who hand out Pulitzers apparently agreed with Thelma, the author’s mother, because they awarded it the 1981 prize for fiction.  Percy concludes the forward:

The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author – his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two.  Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.

It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing.  But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.

            The protagonist is a 30-year-old overweight, flatulent, snobbish character who lives with his widowed, downtrodden, alcoholic mother in uptown New Orleans.  His education in medieval history combined with his laziness and his delusional superiority complex make it difficult to retain employment.  He bumbles from one misadventure to another, each with a more destructive outcome than the last.  Along the way we meet more than a dozen other New Orleanians, with varying levels of eccentricity, ambition and haplessness.  The dialogue and the situations that occur are often laugh-out-loud funny, if not downright absurd.

            By coincidence, I was watching the TV series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans at the same time as I was reading, with the result of my imagining Ignatius Reilly’s dialogue in Capote’s voice (as acted by Tom Hollander).  Now I am intermittently watching the series Slow Horses.  The physically repulsive character played by Gary Oldman might appear suave and debonair compared to Ignatius Reilly. I have read that John Belushi, John Candy and Chris Farley were all considered to star as Reilly in film adaptations of A Confederacy of Dunces, but they all died before any such plans came to fruition.

            The writing workshop I joined in Savannah had a class on humor.  I asked what type of humor this book would be considered, and the class leader didn’t come up with a good answer.  He said he’d never been able to finish the book.  One of the other writers said he loved the book so much he’d read it several times.  He opined it could only be fully appreciated by New Orleans natives like himself.  The author of the BuzzFeed list – which is still online, here – doesn’t explain why this is a “must-read” to understand the south.  It seems to me New Orleans is too unique to paint with such a broad brush as “The South.”  Yet, we do learn about various 1960s social issues and racial prejudices.

            I’m glad I read this book, for the experience.  Most of the time I enjoyed both the narrative and the dialogue.  A few passages were long enough to become a little tedious.  It never achieved “can’t put down” status for me, and there were times I put it down long enough to lose the thread of the story.  But I won’t soon forget Ignatius and his mother!