A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)

I have had John Kennedy Toole's 'A Confederacy of Dunces' on my shelf for over a year; a good friend gave it to me for my thirtieth birthday, and she's a friend whose taste in literature I trust completely, but somehow I just hadn't got around to reading it. I knew, of course, the tragic story behind the novel: the author's suicide at the age of only thirty-two with his masterpiece unpublished, only for it to be published eleven years later due to the unstinting persistence of his mother Thelma. In a way, this maudlin detail sort of put me off, which is unusual, as I am quite often a sucker for this sort of thing. I suppose I impute my reticence here to the fact that I knew this to be a comic novel, and the juxtaposition of this fact with the author's untimely death rather un-nerved me. Finally, as I went back to work after the Easter break, I took 'A Confederacy of Dunces' off my shelf and popped it in my satchel. Even then, I had no time to read it that week, so I took it out of my bag on Thursday last and stuck it on my bedside table. My girlfriend was away for the weekend, so when I awoke around eight on the morning of the Royal Wedding, utterly disgusted by our nation's bizarre fascination with a balding blue blooded moron marrying an upper-middle class stick insect, I picked the novel off my bedside table and began reading. Soon after, I began laughing out loud. And I kept reading. This is the best comic novel I have ever read, although to call it that does it something of a disservice; it's a burlesque of the entire twentieth century experiment.

Set in New Orleans in the early 1960s, this novel is undoubtedly dominated by its protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly. He is obese, slothful, eccentric, fiercely intelligent and holds the rest of the world in chilly contempt. When we first meet him, he is waiting for his mother outside a department store wearing his customary costume: an enormous plaid shirt, tent-like tweed trousers and a green hunting cap with ear flaps perpetually down to "prevent head colds". He has bought some sheet music and a replacement lute string. His bizarre appearance prompts a hapless police officer to accost him, leading to a picaresque riot in the streets as Ignatius and his mother escape through the chaos to a seedy bar called the Night of Joy, where a few too many beers leads Ignatius' mother to crash her car into a building. The bill for the damage is astronomical, so Irene Reilly's solution is to send her son, who since college has done nothing except scribble invective onto endless pads of paper in his room, out to work. Ignatius, of course, is utterly unsuited to work, not only because of his slothful attittude to, well, everything, but because his ideals and beliefs are thoroughly medieval in character (he subscribes to late-Roman philosopher Boethius' concept of Fortuna, the blind goddess of Fate spinning a wheel to determine our successes and failures). The surreally absurdist turns that Ignatius' attempts at work cause are genuinely hilarious, and it is around these forays into the world of work and around the people involved in Ignatius' street disturbance at the novel's outset that Toole creates the plot.

The sheer scale of this burlesque of life in 1960s New Orleans is so grand that it is in fact a very difficult book to sum up in any kind of pithy fashion. We have the bumbling patrolman who, in arresting an elderly man who stood up for the escaping Ignatius, earns himself the punishment of dressing up in costumes to try and bring in "suspicious characters" from the French quarter. We have the old man, Claude, obsessed with "Communiss" who ends up courting Ignatius' mother, an illiterate drinker who has indulged her collegiate son to the extent that he takes nothing she says seriously. While in the cells, Claude meets Jones, a black vagrant brought in for stealing a packet of cashew nuts, who is then made to get a job at the Night of Joy, the very bar Ignatius and his mother had hidden in. Ignatius works first at Levy Pants, an outdated work clothing wholesalers, as a filing clerk and then as a hotdog vendor, and the people he meets in these work places are also stirred into the plot. Interestingly, a lot of the literature I read is not plot based at all, rather a stream of events and reflections that are not necessarily connected by anything other than the fact that they are the reflections of the same narrator. When I do read third person omniscient plot based novels, I am struck by just how many balls are being juggled, knowing myself as a writer of fiction how difficult this actually is. The way Toole brings the various comedic plot threads together at the end of the novel is wonderful and the ending is one of the most satisfying I have recently read.

New Orleans itself is vividly rendered as a city of vice, iniquity, diversity and absurdity, one of the most complete portraits of a place I have come across in literature. Nothing is safe from Toole's satirical eye: race relations, McCarthy-ism, college education, all get the treatment. I was particularly fond of Myrna Minkoff, a correspondent and college classman of Ignatius from New York, a devotee of Freud and a beatnik, who writes him letters declaring that his experiences are nothing but paranoid fantasies brought on by a lack of sexual intercourse. Though he responds to these letters with rage, their sparring shows that they have a deep mutual respect for each other. Myrna is very much a cartoon parody figure, but such an amusing one that it is hard to criticise Toole for this fact.

I loved this book from the first paragraph. It is a grand parade of ridiculous events caused by one of the most memorable comic protagonists since Falstaff. As Walker Percy notes in his foreword, "it is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing", for he surely would have produced a body of work well worth reading. Sadly, we have only this and 'Neon Bible', written when he was only sixteen. And yet, despite the tragedy of his suicide, the comic genius of this book will continue to be his deserved legacy. A must read.