A Confederacy of Dunces
Koenig, Rhoda
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "A Confederacy of Dunces" John Kennedy Toole / Louisiana State University Press / 1;12.95 Rhoda Koenig A famous cartoon of the Twenties shows the guiding spirit of this magazine sitting at...
...Allie, you see, is too good for a world full of people who offer salutations in something less than complete sincerity and who make crude sexual overtures (heavens...
...Patrolman Mancuso, the most inept member of the New Orleans police force, d i s g u i s e s h i m s e l f as a cowboy, a Mexican, a Princeton student, and a British tourist in order to trap homosexuals, but only manages to get hims e l f a r r e s t e d for soliciting and become a source of entertainment to the gay community...
...their transistors...
...periodiRhoda Koenig is the literary editor of New York magazine...
...Along with the others, he must turn the wheels of a terrifically complex but always logical plot...
...cally, while her e m p l o y e r ' s wife, eager to practice the psychology she has learned in her correspondence course, smears lipstick and eye shadow on her w i t h e r e d face and makes her r e p e a t , " I am a very attractive woman...
...Toole displays the manic inventiveness of Mordecai Richler or Stanley Elkin together with the love for order and geometry beloved of his protagonist...
...Like a little child, Allie must be told where to go and what to ask for when she gets there...
...One day, while chasing a ball out of bounds, he meets Allie, an escapee from the local sanitorium...
...Myrna Minkoff, the militant organizer of Students for Liberty, Youth for Sex, Friends of Latvia, and Children for Miscegenation, tours "the rural South to teach Negroes folk songs she had learned at the Library of Congress," only to have them drown her out with the rock music on...
...For further information, contact: Glen E. Thurow, Department of Politics, University of Dallas, Irving, TX 75061 (214) 438-1123, ext...
...Dept...
...I am forced to function in a century which I loathe," wails Ignatius, but he is not allowed to sit and feel sorry for himself...
...The s e t t i n g is New Orleans, or at least a New Orleans, one where the citizens seem to have ample time to indulge their neuroses, dress up in funny clothes, and construct weird accretions of verbal ormolu...
...Enclosed: 5...
...the policeman who tells her to "Have a nice day" but doesn't seem to mean it...
...Each of 12 months we send you and/or your gift receiver 3 exciting, unusual, uncomplicated, predo~minantly southern, recipes with a personal monthly newsletter...
...You look," says a fastidious French Quarter resident, "like Charles Laughton in drag as the Queen of the G y p s i e s . " ) His cart a t t r a c t s a local smut p e d d l e r , who rents the bun compartment as a cache for pornographic photos, one of which turns out to be a picture of Ignatius's dream girl...
...Everybody guarantee to catch them some clap off they glass...
...Sorry...
...She is running away from her predatory parents, who are trying to steal her rightful inheritance, and from the s a n i t o r i u m ' s well-meaning but incompetent Dr...
...Burma Jones, a brooding Negro janitor blackmailed into a job as a nightclub doorman, delivers a subversive spiel, punctuated with disregarded reminders to customers to slow down as they enter the club...
...The u n i v e r s e , of c o u r s e , " Ignatius writes in his journal, " i s based upon the principle of the circle within the circle...
...Think of Bayou Beef, Cousin Ruth's Chicken and Okra Gumbo, Artichoke Chips, Bastille Crepe Cake, Red Beans and Rice, and beyond any horizon...
...That is my worldview that you see...
...Ignatius, a monstrous combination of Alexander Woollcott, Oliver Hardy, W.C...
...Whoa...
...Treasu,y 2. Hon6rd de Balzac 7. Anatole France 1'2...
...The novel's heroine, Kate, cannot manage the most elementary of tasks and pressures of life, so she regresses to a state of infantilism...
...in collector's editions for just $7 39 a voh,me (Little more than the cost of a quality paperback ) And there is no mimmum number of books you must buy As a member, you can select the books you want to own from a list of more than 40 great works of literature, history, biography, and philosophy Many of them are rarely found in bookstores today-and then, often only in paperback These volumes are remarkable values "Fhey're hardbound in matched wheat-colored buckram, worked and stamped in crimson, black, and 23 karat gold And through direct-to-the-public distribution, we are able to offer our members these deluxe editions for only $7 39 each, plus shipping Interested~ We'll send you your introductory selection for only $1 plus shipping...
...It must be done by now") and who f r u s t r a t e s his literary ambitions by attempting to clean up his room...
...A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES John Kennedy Toole / Louisiana State University Press / 1;12.95 Rhoda Koenig A famous cartoon of the Twenties shows the guiding s p i r i t of this magazine sitting at his desk, over a caption r e a d i n g : " H . L . Mencken trying to think of more things Chat annoy him...
...I t ' s that marvelous policeman...
...Robertson's Recipes is not an overwhelming cookbook...
...Ivan Turgenev The Way o~ All Flesh Lhopm Fathers and So.s The Classics Club Roslyn, N Y 11576 Please enroll me as a member and send me at once book number__ _ iEnter number of your selection from hst above ) I enclose no money now After a week's examinauon, I wdl either keep my book and pay $1fplus s l , p p m g l or return :t I wdl get a complete list of tltles from whfch to select the books I want For each volume I choose, I pay only $7 39 (plus shipping) I may return any book, at the Club's expense, for full credit and I may cancel my membership at any time ~lr :m~ 0 - L B AI)I)Rt ~S CO 3~7 3G (ITY STATE ztp Nt,tc Member, a~cepted ,n U S A and Canada only C,nad,an members w,II br ~erved Morn Onl~rlO O~ef ~llghtly dt~erent in Canada THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 33 though their dreams fail again and again, bounce happily back, convinced that the next time the planets will arrange themselves in the proper order...
...One gets the impression that, like Peter Pan, she didn't like the world, so she decided never to grow up...
...For Walker Percy this idea is something of an artistic conceit...
...RHETORIC AND AMERICAN STATESMANSHIP A Conference on "Rhetoric and American Statesmanship" will be held at the University of Dallas October 16-18, 1980 hosted by the Department of Politics Speakers will include: FORREST McDONALD HARVEY C. MANSFIELD, JR...
...Toole's sympathy and affection for these misfits shine through the disa s t e r s he heaps on them...
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...You will have to read this one for yourself, as a combined act of pleasure--and penance...
...Again, as in The Moviegoer, our hero takes upon himself the detailed organization of his girl's everyday existence...
...We shall never know, but something else is certain: how much we've lost now that he lies where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his breast...
...A l l of these characters, except for the industrious Patrolman Mancuso, share an aversion to work that is remarkable even for New Orleans...
...Along with these "petitJoshua Gilder is Associate Editor of Saturday Review...
...Finally, in 1976, she got it to Walker Percy, who agreed with her...
...The book was published only as a result of her persistence in shoving at people the smeary carbon of what she insisted was a great novel...
...This leads him to the Night of Joy night club, where Burma Jones advertises the extremely dubious floor show and Patrolman Mancuso is set to close in and . . . . I give up...
...Come in, see Miss Harla O'Horror dancin with her pet...
...the Willmoore Kendall Program in Politics and Literature of the Institute of Philosophic Studies, University of Dallas The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship The public is invited to attend, no registration required...
...Sir Thomas More 15...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980...
...Ignatius Reilly, the hero of A Confederacy of Dunces, shares Mencken's misanthropy but does not confine h i m s e l f to such s e d e n t a r y work...
...YEAR MEMBERSHIP: 516.40 6 MONTH MEMBERSHIP: 58.50 (including postage and handling) (including postage and handling) Mall to: Katherine Ross Thoman, Robertson's Recipes of the Month 3S45-A Victoria Road, Mountain Brook, A!abama 35223...
...Whoa...
...the jogger who sits next to her and talks nice but seems to have ulterior motives...
...Will B a r r e t t , a r e t i r e d lawyer and widower (who had married into great wealth), suffers not merely from the gently distressing anomie of his predecessor, Binx, but also from what turns out to be a rare synaptical dysfunction that causes him to fall down on the golf course and ruin his otherwise better-thanpar game...
...After being fired from Levy Pants, where he foments an ill-fated rebellion of the proletariat, Ignatius turns up as a hot-dog vendor, dressed in a pirate costume to attract the tourist trade...
...While sitting on a park bench, for instance, she notices the "ironies" of contemporary life: the ridiculous changes in fashion, all new to her after her lengthy incarceration...
...Their decision to marry means that Binx will, in essence, be holding her hand through the r e s t of her life...
...ness was clear even in his first novel, The Moviegoer...
...Allie is an innocent, a tabula rasa, and through her eyes we are meant to see how silly and artificial our sane world is...
...Oh...
...Holmes department s t o r e , " s t u d y i n g the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in d r e s s " or down at the P r y t a n i a t h e a t r e , s c r u t i n i z i n g " t h e c r e d i t s closely to find names of performers who normally nauseated him...
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...Ignatius, what's all this trash on the floor...
...And all of them subscribe to one of Jonathan Swift's most treasured beliefs: that "when a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him...
...The circles widen, g y r a t e , and blend dizzyingly, like the circles on those spiral-painted wind-up toys...
...All of them, Robertson's Recipes o f t h e Month, I n c . The Redpe Markeh that b, ROBERTSON'S RECIPES OF THE MONTH has mTIved, We fantasize in the kitchen--but it's real for you...
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...Not only is it fun to be crazy, the fairy tale goes, i t ' s virtuous as well: The insane have opted out of a debased world to lead the moral life of s a i n t s , uncompromised by the meanness and pettiness of everyday living...
...Was it such discouragement over his own failed efforts to get his novel published that drove Toole to suicide...
...William Makepeace Selected Poem, Selected Essays Thackeray, Henry Esmond 5. Samuel Butler I0...
...Fields, and Baby LeRoy, is one of the many vigorous o b s e s s i v e s , p e r v e r t s , and victims who throng J ohn Kennedy T o o l e ' s freewheeling novel...
...Miss Trixie, the senile accountant at Levy Pants, bleats, "Am I retired yet...
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...Nevertheless, Kate's childishness is supposed to make her appealing: We are undoubtedly to see in her another, if slightly jaundiced, version of the helpless woman-child saved by the manly hero...
...Since a childhood trauma, which in the course of the novel he begins to relive and remember fully for the f i r s t time, Barrett's life has been, in a sense, p a r e n t h e t i c a l . His flight in early manhood up North and into the arms of a rich but plain wife, it turns out, was an attempt to escape the encumbrances of his past: the South, failure, a family suicide...
...Just fill in and mail the coupon now while you're thinking about it I. Sir Francis Bacon 6. Anton Chekhov I I. Francis T Palgrave Selected Essays Short Stones The Golde...
...Ignatius sarcastically torments his bedraggled mother, who tries to hide her muscatel in the oven ("Why don't you take it out...
...Their relationship is so cloyingly infantile, in fact, that its consummation at a Holiday Inn suggests nothing so much as the mating of three-year-olds...
...236- home (214) 255-0692 - - or Peter W. Schramm, Western Director, ISI, 219 N. Indian Hill Blvd., Suite 200, Claremont, CA 91711 (714) 621-4754 THE SECOND COMING Walker Percy / Farrar Straus & Giroux / 1;12.95 Joshua Gilder I t is surprising how many people, despite overwhelming evidence of the acute distress of the mentally ill, continue to believe in the "King of Hearts" vision of the blissfully insane...
...Duk, who has almost destroyed her memory with repeated shock treatments...
...The two of them work fine together, Allie says, because he tends to fall down, and she--proud of herself for installing an antique, two-ton stove in her woodland home with pulleys and ropes--is a "hoister...
...Percy's tendency to romanticize mental ill...
...EVA BRANN JEFFREY TULIS JOHN ZVESPER WALTER BERNS THOMAS B. SILVER LARRY P. ARNN CARNES LORD HARVEY FLAUMENHAFT The Conference is being sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc...
...At the moment, I am in an inner circle...
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...The money from Confederacy's royalties, paperback rights, and movie option will go to the mother of John Kennedy Toole, who killed himself in 1969 at age 32...
...Plutarch OId Genot The C,ime of Sylvesue Bo..ard Selrcted bw a.d Essays 3.William Bradford 8. Benjamin Franklin t 3. Edgar Allan Poe T~e H~sto,y oJ Plyr~outb Aulohog,apby Collected Works 4. Robert Browning 9. Montaigne 14...
...To save her from the anxiety of having to make choices, Binx, the narrator-hero, takes it upon himself to plan K a t e ' s day step by step, sending her on errands, telling her what route to take on the bus, which seat to sit in, whom to speak to and what to say...
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...When I g n a t i u s ' s h a r r i e d mother finally i n s i s t s t h a t he get a job, he hits upon the idea of a paper route: "Perhaps you could drive me about in the car and I could toss the papers from the rear window...
...When not in his room, covering his Big Chief writing tablets with diatribes against blasphemy, capitalism, and "American Bandstand," he is in front of the D.H...
...F10A, 163-09 Depot, Flushing NY 11358 mal" attacks, Barrett develops a terrible slice...
...Robertson's Recipes is warm, continuing, and pure pleasure...
...Percy develops the plot of his new novel, The Second Coming, along the same lines...
...In an essential way Barrett, too, has never grown up...
Vol. 13 • October 1980 • No. 10
