I don’t have much to say for this one other than that I finished A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole recently and it was very good. I liked it so much that I’m starting it over from the beginning, which I never do, to see if I notice anything new. Despite being written in the 60s, I think it comments very insightfully on personality types that had never been seriously platformed before the internet. It’s been a while since a book made me audibly laugh this much, so I thought it was worth a blog post.
Dunces follows Ignatius J. Reilly, an 30-year-old man unemployed and living at home in New Orleans despite having a master’s degree. Now before you say “Hold on a second! That’s going to be all of us! It’s over!” I’ll make it clear that if Ignatius is not incapable of working, he is unwilling. He is a deep-seated hypochondriac who claims to be grievously injured by every light grievance; he frequently refers to his pyloric valve, which supposedly closes at the sight of anything Ignatius finds distasteful, making him bloat. This happens often, for Ignatius is a medievalist. He believes the downfall of mankind began with the Enlightenment, when hardworking peasants were made to get actual jobs. This makes most modern things, especially pop culture, corrosive to his soul. His hobbies include music, screaming at the TV, screaming at the movie screen and masturbation.
Ignatius harbors political views that would make today’s average gooner chud blush. His ex-girlfriend, a beatnik/heiress named Myrna Minkoff, reminds me of some people I know. His mother, who he lives with, is tragically saddled with a monster of her own creation. All of their lives will be changed when Ignatius is finally forced to get a job.
It was difficult deciding how I was going to voice the characters in my head. One of the book’s epigraphs compares the New Orleans accent to those found in Jersey City, Hoboken and Long Island, so in theory I should have known what everyone sounded like. But with Ignatius’s prolix vocabulary, it was hard to read him as anything other than a haughty English aristocrat. In the end, I settled on reading most of the characters in the voice of my friend Joe McDonald, who I hope is reading this.
I wish I had more to say about this book, but unfortunately, I feel like I couldn’t write anything about the novel without restating the foreword. I also feel like I have to read Don Quixote before I say anything. So maybe I’ll write about this book later. For now, you get a synopsis. Go check out Dunces, you’ll like it. And if you’ve already read it, let me know so I can talk about it with someone.
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