The Severed Cortex

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Neon-Bible-John-Kennedy-Toole/dp/0802132073/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211814081&sr=8-1

Ignatius will do you right.

That's what my old McSalty's manager Jack said as he handed me a dog eared copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. I didn't read a whole hell of a lot back then, and he knew it because he made me promise that I'd read it. It sat at home in my basement bedroom collecting dust for a couple of weeks while we wasted hours and hours playing Jack Nicklaus golf on Nintendo upstairs; or as we liked to call it, Jack Nicholson golf. Sliced it in the woods, god dammit. But eventually the promise I made to Jack made me at least pick it up and try it, and like everyone else I was hooked. Ignatius did do me right.

And so, the tortured life that was John Kennedy Toole became legend for me as it did for so many others. Most people think he only had the one book in print and for a long time that was true, but the legend of Toole eventually forced the hand of the book caretaker and in 1989 a lesser known work called The Neon Bible was published. When stacked against A Confederacy of Dunces it simply doesn't compare. It's not absurdist comedy for one thing. Instead it's a coming of age story of a socially outcast boy in the rural South. Hmmm ... write what you know? For another, this is obviously written by a very young person or someone very new to writing, or both in this case. Where Dunces was a book full of highly descriptive, rich characters, Bible is very minimalist. But don't let the juvenile writing and minimalist style fool you, the characters take on a depth that is far beyond what is actually written on paper about them. The story is told in first person omniscient, but that is somewhat limited by the voice of the boy the story is seen through. The view is widened as the boy grows older, but the innocence of the main character and his understanding of the adult world paints one picture of the supporting characters and the actions of those characters paints another. And if you really buy into that whole write what you know thing, which I do, I'm sure you can find parallels between the crazy mother, the bawdy aunt, and the girl from out of town love interest and Toole's life. It's quite impressive seeing the character evolve over time and when you replace the character David with the author Ken you can't help but read it in that context. At least I did. Even if he were just writing about his life, with embellishments and very little skill, you have to be impressed when you realize that Toole was 16 when he wrote it.

Toole wrote Dunces almost a decade later than The Neon Bible and while there are apparently no documents suggesting Toole wrote anything other than these two manuscripts, it's hard to fathom that he could go from the minimalist novel at age 16 to the American classic in his early twenties without a lot of practice in between. If there was anything, his mother probably destroyed it, but I'm hoping there's something still hidden out there. Until then I'll just have to re-read the only two out there.