With April Fool’s Day coming up Monday, I was thinking about a book to fit the occasion. April Fool’s is a day with an unclear origin that is set aside as a time for people to make fools of each other by playing pranks.
A book that came to mind that you might... or might not... be foolish to read is John Kennedy Toole’s book, A Confederacy of Dunces.
This is the only Toole novel published. When it came out it was an instant best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.
It also became a “cult novel,” on the order of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, works popular more for some weird or bizarre quality than for any superior values.
Toole would have enjoyed that aspect of his fame, but he had committed suicide in 1969 in Biloxi, Miss., due to depression and paranoia, and didn’t live to enjoy the acclaim that might have kept him going.
Eleven years after his death, his mother, with whom he had lived and had a difficult relationship, took the manuscript first to big publishers, where one famous editor labeled its plot and theme “meaningless.” Finally she took it to acclaimed author Walker Percy, who deemed it “incredible,” and it was published by LSU Press in 1980.
I heard about the novel when a new flutter of interest prompted a revival of reviews and comments in 2015, and I happened to find it for $1 at a discount book store.
So I read it, sometimes feeling “April foolish” for wasting my dollar.
It follows the adventures, or misadventures, of Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, slothful but well-educated 30-year-old who, like its author, still lives with his mother in Uptown New Orleans in the 1960s.
It is a picaresque plot, meaning that the protagonist goes from situation to situation, none of which has any obvious connection to any other, as Ignatius’s life didn’t seem to have much connection with anything solid. Perhaps that was the author’s comment on modern life for most people.
One reviewer described the book as “...A timelessly funny and fast-moving novel, spiralling through a uniquely unhinged world.”
For me, a person who tries at all costs to avoid “spiraling through an unhinged world,” it was challenging not to keep saying as I read, “Oh, for Pete’s sake!”
Ignatius is a most unlikeable protagonist. He hates people and condemns society. In his delusion he sees himself as superior to everyone else. He blames his difficulty in life on the inferior people around him and on some unnamed higher power that is out to get him.
On the positive side, there were some very funny parts. And the author got New Orleans right. The ambience is there. Many locals think it is the best and most accurate depiction of the city in any work of fiction. Toole was an excellent mimic in real life and recreates some of the dialects of New Orleans perfectly, which I enjoyed.
The characters are uniquely unhinged themselves so it’s hard to say they are well-depicted. However, I did like the character of Burma Jones, a man who laments the conditions of his life, but, unlike Ignatius, takes everything cheerfully and moves on.
Ignatius himself goes from one scrap with the world to another, dragging his poor drunken mother and everyone else behind him. When he learns that his mother plans to have him committed to a mental institution, he is rescued by his only friend from college, the quirky, crusading Myra, who, the moment they pull away from the curb heading for New York, realizes that she has made a mistake.
I never figured out how seriously to take this book. Read it perhaps as a palate cleanser for an overdose of romances, mysteries and psychological horror novels.
The title of the book is based on a quote by the 18th century Irish writer Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
The implication of that title may be that while Ignatius is so delusional and ineffective as to appear to be the dunce, perhaps the reader is the dunce for rolling her eyes and failing to appreciate his genius.
And perhaps we are the April Fools.
I don’t think so, but prop Toole’s only published novel under your reading lamp and decide for yourself.
