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The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
Viking, 355 pages, $23.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-670-85604-5
Delaney Mossbacher and his wife, Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, live in Arroyo Blanco, an exclusive community at the top of a canyon outside Los Angeles. At the bottom of the canyon live Cándido Rincón and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, América, who have crossed the border illegally from Mexico. In chapters that alternate between the two couples Boyle presents the contrasts between the haves and the have-nots.
Delaney Mossbacher is a nature writer who fancies himself a West Coast Annie Dillard. When he's not writing his column at home on his word processor in florid language, he's out walking and observing nature, storing up details for future columns. Kyra is a high-powered real estate agent who dreams of opening her own agency. The couple, described as "liberal humanists," are consummate yuppies, eating their granola and fresh fruit for breakfast, their tofu kabobs and fresh mixed greens for dinner. When the trustees of Arroyo Blanco propose building a gate at the entrance, Delaney objects in principle.
Meanwhile, Cándido comes up out of the canyon daily to wait for work at the nearby labor exchange. He's willing to work hard at any job in hopes of earning enough money to rent an apartment before the baby is born. But work is sporadic, and just when he begins to accumulate a nest egg, he has to dip into it to carry himself and his wife over a lean time. One night as Cándido crosses the road to return to his wife, Delaney's car hits him. As an illegal alien Cándido must refuse the medical help Delaney offers him. Delaney gives Cándido a $20 bill before the injured man disappears over the lip of the canyon.
There's no question where the author's sympathies lie, but Boyle fails to engage the reader's sympathy. None of the main characters rises above caricature. In fact, Boyle portrays Cándido as so completely hapless—always taking one step forward, then two backward—that finally Cándido comes across as a bungler, a comic buffoon. And the change of Delaney from "liberal humanist" to gun-toting protector of truth, justice, and the American wilderness is unbelievable. Finally, the lack of adequate character development reduces the book's ending to melodrama. There's no depth to this novel; I feel that I have not learned anything new or become in any way a better person for reading it.
Novels
The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996)
Viking, 226 pages, $22.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-670-86775-6
In this first-person narrative, Paula O'Leary Spencer, age 39, tells the story of her life as a battered wife. For 17 years she was brutally abused by her husband, Charles "Charlo" Spencer. The present time of the narrative is two years after Paula finally kicked Charlo out of the house, one year after Charlo was killed in a police shootout while holding a banker's wife hostage. Paula's story gathers force as she gradually fills in the background of her life, returning occasionally to the present to comment on the past from her current perspective.
Now an alcoholic, Paula admits that as teenagers she and Charlo, before their marriage, would drink together. After marriage, she drank increasingly more heavily to ease the pain of his beatings. But it was her drinking that gave the doctors, nurses, social workers, even family and friends, an excuse to ignore her:
The doctor never looked at me. He studied parts of me but he never looked at my eyes. He never looked at me when he spoke. He never saw me. Drink, he said to himself. I could see his nose twitching, taking in the smell, deciding. None of the doctors looked at me."It was my little secret and they all helped me keep it" (p. 188), she says.I didn't exist. I was a ghost. I walked around in emptiness. People looked away; I wasn't there. They stared at the bruises for a split second, then away, off my shoulder and away. There was nothing there. No one looked; eyes stared everywhere else.
(p. 186)
How can a woman love a man who abuses her? Even Paula doesn't know. She just knows that it's true:
I still loved him. I'd loved him before I even met him and I never stopped. The minute I saw him, before I saw his face properly, I knew what being in love was. It was dreadful. I was already jealous, already expecting him to leave me, nearly wanting him to be a bastard; I hadn't even heard his voice yet. I loved him when I was throwing him out. I loved him when Gerard [the officer who comes to tell her of Charlo's death in the shootout] rang the bell. I love him now.And she knows, too, that often there's no reason, no rational explanation, for why someone batters another:(p. 24)
But he wasn't unemployed the first time he hit me … Charlo Spencer lost his job and started beating his wife. It's not as simple as that. He started robbing. He shot a woman and killed her. Because he didn't have a job, was rejected by society. It would be nice if it was that easy. If I could just think back and say Yes, that was how it was. Charlo Spencer lost his job and started beating his wife. I could rest if I believed that; I could rest. But I keep on thinking and I'll never come to a tidy ending. Every day. I think about it every minute. Why did he do it? No real answers come back, no big Aha. He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and I took it. It's as simple as that, and as stupid and complicated. It's terrible.Even Charlo's death cannot remove either the physical or the emotional scars:(p. 192)
I have marks where burns used to be. I have a backache that rides me all day. I've a scar on my chin. It happened. I have parts of the house that make me cry. I have memories that I can touch and make me wake up screaming. I'm haunted all day and all night. I have mistakes that stab me before I think of them. He hit me, he thumped me, he raped me. It happened.People without personal experience of abuse often ask why a woman stays with a man who abuses her. Paula Spencer shows us that there are no easy answers to that question. She may not make us understand the situation of a battered woman, but Paula certainly makes us sympathize with it. The Woman Who Walked into Doors is a powerful, eye-opening novel.(p. 185)What did I do in the 80s? I walked into doors. I got up off the floor. I became an alcoholic. I discovered that I was poor, that I'd no right to the hope I'd started out with. I was going nowhere, straight there. Trapped in a house that would never be mine. With a husband who fed on my pain. Watching my children going nowhere with me; the cruellest thing of the lot. No hope to give them.
(p. 204)
Another novel about domestic violence: Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen.
My Son's Story (1990)
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 277 pages, $19.95 hardcover
I'm embarrassed to admit that this is the first work I've read by Nadine Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991. Born in 1923, Gordimer has lived her entire life in South Africa. Her novels and short stories showcase her opposition to the restrictive racial and social policies of the government of South Africa.
My Son's Story tells the story of Will (named after Shakespeare), the 15-year-old son of Sonny, a member of the racial group known as Colored. Sonny was originally a schoolteacher, but when his persuasive powers and personal charisma were discovered, he became active in the freedom movement. He rose high up in the movement and was imprisoned for a while for his anti-government activity.
The novel opens as Will, about to enter a movie theater for an afternoon of guilty pleasure, meets his father, lately released from prison, coming out of the theater with his white lover. Will now knows that his father is betraying Aila, Will's mother; he further knows that his father expects Will to keep quiet about this at home. Will resents being made complicit in his father's family betrayal as much as the betrayal itself.
Over the next few years, as Will struggles to come to terms with his father's moral hypocrisy, Will's older sister, Baby, gets married and leaves the country to work in the freedom movement. Aila, Will's mother, also becomes involved in the freedom movement under the guise of going to visit Baby and her child. When Aila is brought to trial for possessing weapons, she too chooses exile, leaving only Will and Sonny at home. In the meantime, the hierarchy within the freedom movement has changed and Sonny has slipped from his high position to a much lower status within the group.
The book's title raises the question of whose story this really is. On the surface it's the story of Will, Sonny's son. Yet the only first-person narrator in the book is Will himself, suggesting that the my of the title refers to Will as well. Indeed, Will's story is the universal story of sons growing up and coming to terms with the reality of their fathers' imperfection. Although by the time the book ends Will himself as yet has no son, some day Will's son will relive his own version of this story, just as Will's father (named Sonny, after all) undoubtedly did as well. The final chapter of the novel, narrated by Will, begins as follows: "It's an old story—ours. My father's and mine. Love, love/hate are the most common and universal of experiences. But no two are alike, each is a fingerprint of life. That's the miracle that makes literature and links it with creation itself in the biological sense" (p. 275).
My Son's Story works on both the political/social level, as a condemnation of racial and social injustice, and on the universal level of human experience. By connecting the particular with the universal, Gordimer raises her story from a mere program (or propaganda) novel to great literature.
The Street Lawyer (1998)
Doubleday, 348 pages, $27.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-385-49099-2
This was one of two novels chosen for lawyer month in one of my real-life book groups. (The other book was The Deception by Barry Reed.) I admit that, since reading this book, I've read all of Grisham's novels except The Partner.
The Street Lawyer is a first-person narrative by Michael Brock, a 32-year-old attorney in Washington, D.C. At the beginning of the story Michael, a graduate of Yale, is on the fast track to becoming a partner in a huge and prestigious law firm and thereby making lots of money. Then one morning a homeless man with what look like sticks of dynamite strapped to his body takes Michael and some of his colleagues hostage. The homeless man asks each of the hostages how much money he donated the previous year to shelters and other charities that provide food, shelter, and medical care directly to the homeless. As a result of his experience Michael has an epiphany and cannot stop thinking about the problems of the homeless after the hostage situation is resolved.
If all of this sounds too stereotypically easy—well, it is. Grisham almost always relies on plot more than character to carry his books, but in this novel the characters are even more stereotyped than usual. First there's Michael, the sinner who experiences a near-death conversion experience. Then there's Claire, Michael's wife. Michael tells us that, even before the hostage incident, their marriage was all but over. When Michael began working nearly round the clock at the law firm, Claire attended medical school and is now completing a residency in neurosurgery. Every day Michael and Claire play power games of the "my job is more demanding and important than your job" variety. Claire never shows even a shred of concern for the man she's married to, either during the hostage crisis or later, when he's in a car accident. And when Claire decides that divorcing Michael is the most economically advantageous plan of action, she hires a feminist lawyer with a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness. Finally there's Mordecai Green, who runs the legal clinic for people of the street. Grisham should have just gone ahead and named him Saint Mordecai. After working a full day in the legal clinic, Mordecai often spends most of the night at a shelter for the homeless. Although Mordecai tells Michael that he has a family, there's little indication that he ever goes home to see them.
With such stereotyped characters, the novel's ending is predictable. Yet despite these shortcomings, Grisham manages to inject enough of a plot (there's the problem of a stolen file and the possibility of charges for ethics violations) to keep readers turning pages.
But what Grisham fails to do is to engage readers' emotions and get them worked up over the problems of the homeless. Perhaps the biggest reason for this failure is his use of a first-person narrator; this is, after all, Michael's story, not ours. But even the glimpses into life on the streets that Grisham gives us through Michael aren't compelling. As one member of our book group pointed out (thanks, Nancy), the reader gets a much more visceral picture of the life of a homeless person from Mary Willis Walker's All the Dead Lie Down than from The Street Lawyer.
Snow in August (1997)
Warner Books, 384 pages, $7.50 paperback, ISBN 0-446-60625-1
Michael Devlin is 11 years old when the blizzard hits Brooklyn during the final week of 1946. As Michael struggles through the wind and snow on his way to serve as altar boy at Sacred Heart, he hears a voice asking for his help. Michael manages to overcome his fear long enough to enter the synagogue and turn on the lights for the rabbi. So begins the friendship between Michael and Rabbi Judah Hirsch, originally from Prague.
Soon after this Michael and his friends are buying candy in a local store when Frankie McCarthy enters and beats the elderly Jewish storeowner nearly to death for a pack of cigarettes. Frankie is the leader of the local gang, the Falcons. On his way out of the store Frankie tells Michael, "You didn't see nothing, kid." Afraid of Frankie and of being branded a squealer, Michael keeps quiet, even when the police come to his house to question him. But the police pick Frankie up anyway, and the rest of the Falcons, thinking Michael has ratted on their leader, beat Michael severely, breaking his leg and putting him into the hospital for several days.
Michael's friends, fearful for their own safety, abandon him after the beating. Michael begins associating almost exclusively with Rabbi Hirsch. The rabbi teaches Michael Yiddish and tells him stories of his early life in Prague, and Michael helps the rabbi with his English and familiarizes him with American customs, particularly baseball. Most of Michael's friends believe the stories they've heard about the mysterious, awful rituals that take place in the synagogue, but Michael knows that if they would just meet Rabbi Hirsch, they'd like him.
The story is played out against the backdrop of Jackie Robinson's becoming the first black man to play Major League baseball. Michael knows that a player as good as Jackie can only help the team. And if Jackie Robinson can help Michael's beloved Dodgers win the pennant, what difference does the color of his skin make?
Finally, in a touch of magical realism, it's one of Rabbi Hirsch's rituals that brings snow to Brooklyn in August and ends the Falcons' reign of terror over Michael Devlin's neighborhood.
Reviewing this novel in Commonweal (August 15, 1997, p. 26 f.), Sean Callery wrote:
To write disparagingly of Snow in August would be akin to telling a child there is no Santa Claus. A strength of this tale is the author's unabashed romanticism. How to judge where romance and fantasy end and reality begins is not always apparent. But this might be of little account in the end. The book is a good read, and such a technicality will not matter to many readers.
Indeed, Snow in August is a very politically correct novel; it sends all the right messages about friendship and about prejudice in its various guises. But it also raises additional questions: about loyalty vs. betrayal, about authority vs. anarchy, about dealing with violence. And for these questions the novel's answer is not so clear-cut. I find it to be of more than "little account," more than "a technicality," that Hamill resorts to "romance and fantasy" to answer these questions. The novel's ending bothers me for two reasons: (1) it suggests that people cannot solve their own problems without supernatural intervention, and (2) it solves the problem of violence with more violence. In the end, those messages do matter.
The Book of Ruth (1988)
Houghton Mifflin, 328 pages, $18.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-395-866502
Ruth Grey, caught in a life of both economic and emotional deprivation, lives with her abusive mother, May. When Ruth marries the drug-crazed Ruby Dahl, the first man who ever paid attention to her, she's caught in the power struggle between her mother and her husband. In The Book of Ruth, Ruth narrates her struggle to understand her mother, her husband, and their seemingly inevitable conflicts:
What it begins with, I know finally, is the kernel of meanness in people's hearts. I don't know exactly how or why it gets inside us; that's one of the mysteries I haven't solved yet (p. 1).I know the only way to begin to understand is to steal underneath May's skin and look at the world from behind her small eyes. I shudder when I think about the inside of Ruby's head, but I know I have to journey there too, if I'm going to make sense of what's happened (p. 2).
I'd like to know exactly how much I'm to blame. Was it my character that triggered the events, or chance, that I woke up and found myself in Honey Creek… (p. 4).
It seems as if nobody could really be all bad, although everyone has the meanness in them. Sometimes people choose one person in a crowd to pick at. It makes them feel better to say how there's one entirely rotten person they can blame everything on (p. 6).
Without putting words to it I recognized the beauty of war; I realized that it was entirely in keeping with ordinary human nature (p. 7).
In her own way the uneducated, seemingly simple Ruth reconciles herself to the vagaries of human existence:
A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds.Ruth's narrative voice and her determination to find the meaning of her own life combine to make her a sympathetic, thought-provoking heroine.(p. 326)
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
Henry Holt and Company, 275 pages, $23.00 hardcover, ISBN 0-8050-4920-7
Nineteen-year-old Lily Dahl lives in a rented room over the Ideal Café, where she works the early breakfast shift. In the small town of Webster, Minnesota, she knows the life stories of all the customers she serves regularly. By night Lily is a budding actress preparing for her role as Hermia in the local theater company's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And in the dark early morning hours, while getting ready to go to work, she's a voyeur, spying on Ed Shapiro, the artist from New York City who has taken a room directly across the street from Lily's in the Stuart Hotel.
Over the course of several days we meet the members of this small town with whom Lily interacts: her gruff but soft-hearted boss, Vince, owner of the Ideal; Bert, another waitress at the Ideal and something of a mother figure to Lily; the elderly Mabel Wasley, a former teacher who rents the room next to Lily's and coaches Lily in her portrayal of Hermia; the elderly and filthy Bodler brothers, whose mother probably was killed by their father about 40 years earlier; Hank Farmer, Lily's possessive boyfriend who enjoys the power he gains from working as the town's night police officer; and Martin Peterson, with whom Lily used to play when they were both children but who has grown up to be "not quite right" in the head.
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl reads more like a first draft than a published novel; it's a book that never decides exactly what it is. With the introduction of the 19-year-old protagonist, it looks like a coming-of-age story. But as Lily watches the handsome Ed engrossed in his painting, the book begins to turn into erotica. Then the story takes on elements of mystery. And somewhere around the middle of the book the character Mabel threatens to take over the story.
Underlying all the events are images of blood, shoes, pictures, and questions involving perception and reality, truth and fantasy, the strange and the ordinary. The problem is that none of these ideas is developed significantly. For example, Lily takes a pair of white shoes from the Bodlers' farm, shoes that Helen Bodler may have packed in a suitcase when she was about to leave her husband but that she never got to take with her because her husband probably buried her alive before she could run off. Lily puts these shoes on several times, and they seem to have some significance for her. At one point she dirties the shoes by bleeding on them, then makes them worse by trying to wipe the blood off. She ends up burning the shoes, then rescuing them from the fire before finally burying them. Lily's fascination with these shoes suggests that the shoes have some significance, but what? These are not the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz.
And what is the significance of the word enchantment in the title? The only relation this word has to anything that occurs in the book is the role that enchantment, or a magic spell, plays in Shakespeare's work. As the novel progresses, Lily, with Mabel's help, becomes more convincing in her portrayal of Hermia. One would expect Shakespeare's play to have some thematic significance related to the events that occur in the novel, but no such connection is evident.
An editor, after reading the manuscript for this novel, should have suggested to Siri Hustvedt that she decide on which of the potential stories here is the main one and develop that one into a more coherent novel. As it is, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl is nothing but a sprawling, incoherent mass of suggestions with pretensions toward literary greatness.
At Home in Mitford (1994)
Penguin, 446 pages, $12.95 trade paperback, ISBN 0-14-025448-X
Two words always come up in any description of Jan Karon's books: beloved
(as in "Jan Karon's beloved Mitford series") and gentle. I can understand
the appeal of Karon's books to people who are fed up with the overload
of serial killers and other violence that constitutes most of current popular
fiction; this emphasis on dysfunction and gore does not accurately represent
the reality of most people's daily lives. However, I found that At Home
in Mitford errs too much in the other direction: it presents a world
that's too sanitized, too removed from reality.
At Home in Mitford is set in Mitford, North Carolina, a small town nestled at the foot of the mountains. The main character is 60-year-old Father Tim, rector of the Episcopal church, and a bachelor. The book opens with Father Tim experiencing some unease about his effectiveness in his work. The priest soon begins to feel better when he's adopted by a large dog that he names Barnabas. As the story progresses Father Tim is adopted by a series of other characters: by Puny Bradshaw, the mountain woman whom the church board hires as Father Tim's cook and housekeeper; by Dooley Barlowe, the 11-year-old grandson of the church sexton, whose alcoholic mother can no longer care for him; and finally by Cynthia Coopersmith, the writer and illustrator of children's books who moves in next door to the rectory.
On Thanksgiving Father Tim carries food donated by his parishioners along the creek on the edge of town to a "ramshackle house, sitting near a derelict bridge" (p. 174). Representatives of the other churches in town are also there to share the bounty from their congregations with the occupant of the house, Homeless Hobbes. When one of the churchmen asks Hobbes what's he's going to do with all this food, Hobbes answers that he's going to share it with people less fortunate than he. Someone says he didn't know there was anyone less fortunate than Hobbes, and Hobbes tells him, "`You head up the hill from this creek, and all back in there, you'll find 'em worse off than me. With little young 'uns, too'" (p. 175).
How convenient that the homeless stay outside of town, just beyond the fringes of the townspeople's consciousness (and consciences). Apparently none of these homeless people ever come into town to poke around in the garbage cans behind The Grill (the town diner) or The Local (the grocery store) looking for food. How considerate of them. How convenient for everyone else. And how unrealistic. It's as if Mitford exists under an enclosed dome, like a moon colony in a work of science fiction, with nothing beyond its edge. Or as if there's a force field enclosing the town, keeping everything and everyone else at bay. And although the churchmen are astounded to learn that there's a group of homeless people just outside of town, the response to Hobbes's announcement is interesting: "'Do what you want to with it,' said Rodney. 'It's yours in th' name of the Lord'" (p. 175). And that's that for the homeless.
Further indicative of the lack of reality in this picture of life in a small Southern town is the absence of any significant African-Americans. The only black character in the book is Louella Parsons, life-long friend and servant to the elderly town matriarch, Miss Sadie Burke.
Another, more technical, criticism is that the book contains very little drama. There's no tension building to a climax that's then followed by a resolution, no rising and falling action. Conflict, the element at the heart of storytelling, doesn't exist in Mitford.
On the positive side, the characters are superbly drawn. Puny Bradshaw, Dooley Barlowe, and Uncle Billy all leap to life from the page.
The Deception (1997)
St. Martin's, 422 pages, $6.99 paperback, ISBN 0-312-96494-3
This novel was the companion piece to Grisham's The Street Lawyer for lawyer month at our library book group.
Compared to John Grisham, Barry Reed looks like a master of character creation. Reed's main character, Dan Sheridan, is a middle-aged attorney who's only about ½ step above an ambulance chaser. Sheridan depends on the fees he gets for defending Central American drug runners to pay the office rent, with his income supplemented by handling the wills of rich elderly women and the occasional product liability and medical malpractice case. And Sheridan is not above bending the law, or his ethical standards, when it serves his purpose to do so. Yet Reed manages to make us warm up to this character.
Reed's writing isn't as smooth as Grisham's, though. In particular, Reed has a problem with exposition, that background material at the beginning of a story that an author needs to get across to readers. Reed opens an earlier novel, The Indictment, with a number of lawyers sitting around explaining to each other how the grand jury system works. Now lawyers, of course, would all know how a grand jury operates and would never even have this conversation, which Reed includes to explain the grand jury system to his readers. In The Deception he has one psychiatrist tell another about the patients who will attend the upcoming group therapy session, then even announces that the second doctor "knew all three patients like the back of her hand" (p. 9). In other words, these two doctors never would have had this conversation, except that the author needs to communicate this information to readers somehow.
In The Deception, a promising young tennis star has been hospitalized at St. Anne's Hospital in Boston following a suicide attempt. Now, after being treated with an experimental new drug, she's nearly ready for discharge. Just before being discharged she's taken for a group therapy session with her psychiatrist and two other patients on the fifth floor of the hospital's open atrium section. During a break in the therapy session she jumps from the fifth floor and ends up comatose, with massive brain damage. Dan Sheridan takes the case and sues the hospital (which is run by the Catholic Church) and the psychiatrist for negligence.
It's hard to say much more about the story without spoiling much of the suspense. Just watch how Reed develops Dan Sheridan's character and how you feel about the things that Sheridan does as he investigates the case.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)
translated by A.W. Wheen; rpt. 1975, Little, Brown and Company,
248 pages, $8.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-316-73992-8
Paul Baumer, a 19-year-old German soldier in what would later be known as World War I, narrates his experiences in this classic novel. Paul tells us how he and three of his classmates were convinced by one of their teachers to volunteer for service right after they finished school.
Once he's in the trenches, Paul learns the difference between the rhetoric and the reality of war. Politicians speak of bravery, heroism, and serving the fatherland, but the common soldiers, such as Paul and his friends, learn that war means defecating in your pants when the shelling starts, listening to horses scream while they die, going back out onto the battlefield to bring in a wounded comrade, repeatedly charging and retreating over the same few yards of disputed territory, sharing your food and cigarettes with your fellow soldiers. And while politicians and military leaders insist that "the enemy" is a monster that must be destroyed before it can destroy you, Paul realizes, after he kills his first enemy soldier in a trench, that the enemy is just another young man like himself:
'Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother…'All Quiet on the Western Front is an example of literary realism. Its understatement of the cruel reality of war makes it chillingly yet powerfully effective.(p. 191)
A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
rpt. Wings Books, 1996, 462 pages, ISBN 0-517-12270-7
The title of John Kennedy Toole's cult favorite comes from this quotation by Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him"; from Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting.
The hero of Toole's tome is Ignatius J. Reilly, 30 years old and a life-long resident of New Orleans. An accomplished student of history, Ignatius is forever writing in his Big Chief tablets. When we first meet Ignatius, he is "at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century" (p. 7). Unfortunately, Ignatius's scribblings don't produce any income. When his mother sends him out into the world to find a job and earn some money, the real fun begins.
For Ignatius Reilly is totally out of touch with current reality. Through Ignatius's naïve bunglings, Toole, an equal opportunity satirist, manages to skewer just about every segment of society.
I had heard so much about A Confederacy of Dunces that I was eager to read it. Having finished it, though, I have to wonder what all the fuss was about. With this type of humor, a little goes a long way, and Toole ends Ignatius's story at exactly the point when it threatens to become unbearably tiresome. The novel is amusing, but for me it's an evanescent type of humor that ended soon after I turned the last page.
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