Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Grove, 1980.

This book isn't as good as you remember it. It's funny, but it's only funny. Well, it's more than just funny, it's offensive and bitter and bleak and nihilistic and it's pleased with its own snobbishness. I write these words as a consummate snob.

In the novel gays mince and obsess over decor, and lesbians brawl and wear their hair cropped close. Blacks all have a kind of folksy wisdom and terrible English. Ignatius is exposed as a belching tub of lard, but in the end you know he'd be pleased with this account of this chapter of his life. Toole adores Ignatius and amid his wide-scattered criticisms can't quite do him any real harm.

Here's Andre Condrescu on the book (from Chronicle of Higher Education):

A Confederacy of Dunces was a book that swam upstream, against the flow of time in which it was written. The early '60s saw the awakening of a social conscience that even the great postwar comic novels Catch-22, Cat's Cradle, and Portnoy's Complaint were part of. Their charges were delivered pretty squarely from behind the barricades of anti-establishment liberalism. The incipient tentacles of what came to be known in the '90s as political correctness were already waving within the embryonic culture of the '60s.

The South, at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, was America's designated hell. Southern writers were a suspect species, with a few rare exceptions, including Walker Percy, who eventually (after Toole died) championed the book into print. Confederacy's unabashed use of Negro dialect by Jones, the floorsweeper, and the fun-poking at the spirit-filled black factory workers must have repulsed New York's publishers. There was also the matter of a slew of prancing queens, an evil madam, and a bumbling cop who was a victim, not a villain. And then there was Myrna Minkoff, the Jewish firebrand sexual revolutionary, whose sheer silliness was matched only by Ignatius's megalomania.

It was as if Toole had set out deliberately to turn the stereotypes on their heads, which is, of course, precisely what he did. The failure of American publishers to see this is unforgivable, and proof, more than anything, of a New York brand of provincialism. I am not sure if John Kennedy Toole's suicide was a direct result of his rejection, but even if this played only a small part, the fools have a lot to answer for. Toole's job was far from done.

Setting aside my confusion as to how this novel's inability to engage with anything larger than itself (a chief concern of Heller's, Vonnegut's, and Roth's novels, each one funnier and more inspiring than Toole's) can be read as some subversive act, the question remains of how these stereotypes have been turned on their heads. What such a thing even means.

And re, Andre, that little murderous accusation of those of us who like something more than ridicule and laffs in the novels they read, see Hardin's "Between Queer Performances" essay, which posits the suicide as a factor of Toole's own closeted sexuality.