A Confederacy of Dunces in SpecFic Buddy Reads

Aug 01, 2011 Lyn rated it really liked it

Confederacy of Dunces is a masterpiece of satire and irony, a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for best novel.

It is funny, sometimes uproariously so, and I smiled and chuckled throughout. Toole’s depression and loss was not just of himself and his family, but also of us all, a genius who can create this comedic virtuosity might have written a folio of great work, and perhaps Confederacy was not even his greatest. Or perhaps, the spark that drove him to so bitingly observe our culture and Confederacy of Dunces is a masterpiece of satire and irony, a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for best novel.

It is funny, sometimes uproariously so, and I smiled and chuckled throughout. Toole’s depression and loss was not just of himself and his family, but also of us all, a genius who can create this comedic virtuosity might have written a folio of great work, and perhaps Confederacy was not even his greatest. Or perhaps, the spark that drove him to so bitingly observe our culture and time was also the flame from within that ate him away too, I guess we’ll never know.

Ignatius J. Reilly is to literature as Homer Simpson is to our later culture, a grotesque more than a picaresque, a satirical slap in the face of who we are, a fool’s loving but damning foil to the king. The comparisons to Don Quixote are unavoidable, but whereas Quixote was roguish and loveable, Ignatius never achieves the heroic, even mock heroism. And he is never loveable. And perhaps that is a mark of Toole’s true, painful vision, that our idiosyncrasies need to be made fun of, but there is no gentleness left, that only a rough and stinging rebuke will show through the neon and carnival barkers.

Maybe Ignatius was most timely amidst Toole’s own insanity, in the mid sixties, and by the time of Walker Percy’s “discovery” some of the edge had already worn away, or perhaps even, it was still just poking harmless fun at the products of society. Thirty years later, and the grotesque center stage with spotlights on Ignatius have become as common as reality TV shows, the characters no longer charicatures because of familiarity. So while Confederacy of Dunces is a modern classic, some of its stinging comment has been lost amidst too frequent of the same targets and too many opportunists to admonish gently. Thirty years later, Ignatius is no longer a caricature but a portrait.

But to its credit, Dunces has some redemption, some easy to find, other examples more subtle. By the end, Mrs. Reilly can stand her own ground, while still being a mother who loves her son, Gus Levy has excorsied the demons from his past and seems able to meet future challenges head on. And the true hero of COD, Burma Jones, who, by a lucky stroke of PR savvy, will be a vagrant no more.

Good book.

** 2018 addendum - it is a testament to great literature that a reader recalls the work years later and this is a book about which I frequently think. Ignatius is the memory and this portrait that Toole has given us is not just of this man, but he is a microcosm of a time and place, but in another sense, timeless.

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Mar 26, 2013 Bradley rated it really liked it

Shelves: satire, 2016-shelf

Enter in a long list of posthumously published manuscripts from young authors who committed suicide and this one will probably reach the top of the list along with David Foster Wallace, with the difference being that DFW had garnered fame before his untimely demise.

That being said, this one is full of 50's and 60's humor, more a lambast of society as a whole, of racial perspectives in specific, and a whole lot more of business and miscellany becoming a modern retelling of a certain classic of Ce ...more

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