A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift

I have no idea how to begin describing this book. Perhaps that is why is has been finished for nine days now and I have yet to review it, letting 1.5 books accumulate behind it in the queue. I think I must begin with a few simple words to get the ball rolling: irreverent, witty, grotesque, farcical, erudite. I would compare it to a book of Thomas Aquinas and a MAD magazine, both left under a boy's bed to grow mold and develop patches of stickiness until they gel into one unit of random, insightful and tragi-comic ramblings.

These ramblings are the work of a character named Ignatius Rielly. An over-educated and under-motived slob and medievalist. A slave to the workings of his "valve" and the food that bloats him up to monumental proportions. Lazy, badly dressed and arrogant, Ignatius lists through life, living in his mothers house, living to yell obscenities at daytime television. That is, until he is almost arrested for appearing "suspicious," which stresses his mother, who drags them into a dive on Bourbon Street, where they get quite drunk and offend the establishment, after which his mother drives drunk into a stranger's house, that causes a little problem with the money for reparations, which makes Ignatius venture forth into the workplace and attempt to change the world. All in the first few pages, of course.

The rest is about this interaction between the world of Ignatius and the world reality. I think we begin to love Ignatius, repulsive as he is, for how he doesn't fit in, doesn't want to fit in, and blindly plows through his oddball antics with true courage--that is, the courage to not give a damn whether your world makes sense to anyone else or not. Incredibly funny and often very incisive, Confederacy of Dunces should be standard reading for every high school in America. Would definitely be a jumping off point for further literary ventures. I think this book could bridge the gap for non-bookies, proving to them that literature, even "classic" literature, can be more entertaining than sex. Okay, not sex. Television, though? I hope?

The innate tragedy of the novel, however, is the story of it's author, John Kennedy Toole. This novel was published 11 years after he committed suicide, partially because of his failure as a writer and partially because he was a writer (you know how moody we can be, right?). It was his mother and a professor she recruited that lobbied for the book's publication in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, obviously, in 1981. I suppose that knowing this information in advance, the novel reads out some of Toole's angst against a society that doesn't recognise genius and yet, simultaneous, pokes fun at the oddity, grotesque quality, and stupidity of that genius.