A Confederacy of Dunces

That this book was published at all is something of a miracle. John Kennedy Toole spent the early 1960s writing it only to kill himself in 1969. His mother found a copy of the finished manuscript and shopped it around for a time in the late '70s before finally landing a deal to have it published in 1980. It won the Pulitzer in 1981, nearly twenty years after it had been written.

Toole's legacy more or less begins and ends with A Confederacy of Dunces, and that book's legacy more or less begins and ends with its main character, Ignatius J. Reilly. Here in 2014 we would easily identify this man as one suffering from Asperger's or some other kind of high-functioning autism. In this book, written fifty years ago, he's just kind of a great big buffoon who acts like an asshole and struggles to hold down a job and interact decently with strangers. Toole frequently describes him as gassy, bulbous, and plenty of other unflattering adjectives, but the author obviously had a great deal of love for his protagonist, who has favorably been compared to a modern day Don Quixote. The novel's setting is New Orleans, and while I can't vouch for this personally (I've never been!) it is apparently a wonderfully accurate depiction of that city and its culture embraced by Louisianians.

But frankly, there's just not that much to this story. A series of escalating events that happen to or are otherwise caused by Ignatius and a cast of supporting characters is present, sure, but I never felt, while reading this one, like anything was heading anywhere meaningful. In fact, after I finished reading the book, I did a little online research to make sure I hadn't missed any major subliminal messages in the story, or hadn't ignored a vital plot point here or there. What I found, on the contrary, was that the entire reason Toole couldn't et the book published in his lifetime was this very lack of cohesion to his story. This made me feel good. Publishers in the 1960s found the same flaws here that I did some fifty years later! I quickly stopped feeling good when I realized that this is part of what ultimately drove Toole to suicide at 31, but, yeah. Here's the response from one publisher, which summarizes my main beef with the novel better than I could:

It seems that you understand the problem—the major problem—involved, but think that the conclusion can solve it. More is required, though. Not only do the various threads need resolving; they can always be tied together conveniently. What must happen is that they must be strong and meaningful all the way through—not merely episodic and then wittily pulled together to make everything look as if it's come out right. In other words, there must be a point to everything you have in the book, a real point, not just amusingness that's forced to figure itself out.

It's not clear to me how extensively Toole reworked his novel before dying, but the same problem remains today. So, in the end, this was a very well-written book with some memorable characters and a great sense of place and setting, but it was a book where nothing really happened and it was frankly a bit tiring to slog through sometimes, no matter how amusing each individual page was.