Long Distance Book Club was created out of a desire to analyze works we admire with people we don’t often see in person. Using a google document, we invited a few friends to discuss A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole over several weeks.
We hope you enjoy.
Has anyone read this book before? What were your first impressions of the first, say, 50 pages?
Caleb Michael Sarvis (CMS): I hadn’t even heard of this book before it was proposed to us, and the beginning took a little bit of muscling to get through. It took a little while for me to realize this whole book was a “bit.” Our “hero” is no hero at all, and could very well be a villain.
Riley Manning (RM): Really? It’s been on my shelf forever. The beginning definitely took a little getting used to. It’s sort of ramble-y, like the Adventures of Augie March.
C.H. Hooks (CH): Caleb, my mind is blown! I’m with Riley. I read it about ten years ago, before heading down to NOLA. There’s even a giant statue of Ignatius there. I’m totally sucked in with the diction in the first 50. The absurdity of the situation is wonderful.
RM: Chris, do you remember your thoughts when you first started reading it?
CH: Riley, I don’t remember what I did last week, and clearly don’t remember how to answer a question. I think that the first thing to strike me about Confederacy of Dunces is the relative ease with which we slink into Ignatius’ world — his New Orleans. Why can’t it be this easy to fall into every book?
Lots of characters in this book. Which ones were you most drawn to? Which ones fell flat?
CMS: The most interesting parts of the book for me were the interactions between Ignatius and his lady-friend Myrna in New York. Their battle of “wits” was the funniest part, especially her focus on Ignatius’ repressed sexuality, which made me realize — IGNATIUS IS AN INCEL!
RM: Dude I totally made the incel connection, too! I love Jones and the Night of Joy crew.
CMS: I didn’t care at all for the Mr. and Mrs. Levy moments, as well as the Trixie stuff. But the Night of Joy was certainly a fun place to be.
RM: I read that Toole was least satisfied with Mr. and Mrs. Levy, but I liked them. They’re a smidge on the more familiar side of the crazy line. I mean, we all know a couple where one is constantly punishing the other. The Levy’s made the other characters seem even more outlandish.
CH: Agreed. It’s funny, I think Mr. & Mrs. Levy were essential to show what sits on the other side of New Orleans. I felt they were intentionally made flat because there is very little value to them in society. There is/was this crumbling business where the wealthy family is totally comfortable smothering what has made it successful and wealthy in the first place. There is a total disconnection from the source of their comfort. Whereas there is freedom in the character of Jones even though the threat of the law is held over him. He and Ignatius are in similar positions, poor, forever-New Orleans people with no job in the beginning—the difference is their race. The “real characters” are more valuable and authentic. On Minkoff, I think she was a tool(e) for ideology. I dig her idea about activating a “Divine Right” movement to split the conservative party. I think this idea has legs 🙂
RM: On the Levy’s: the characters in CoD all suffer from a foggy discontent that they all have a hard time bringing into focus, including the Levy’s. That’s why they fit into the cast, for me. IDK about “freedom” when it comes to Jones—it’s either work for peanuts or get arrested for not working. Jones seems to have no desire to be understood in a greater sense. He only wants to get paid for the work he does. He feels so pragmatic to me.
To borrow a phrase from the Red Scare podcast, Minkoff sees herself as an “ideological freedom fighter.” Is she just as off-base as Ignatius?
CMS: Definitely off-base in her own way. I mean, why is she even writing him? What is she hoping to prove? Nothing, really. She–like Ignatius–just wants a reason to argue and needs a movement of sorts to be her vehicle in which to do so.
So, is Ignatius a genius or an imbecile?
CMS: Neither? He’s a pseudo-intellectual, a conman. He uses a higher vocabulary to take advantage of the under-educated people around him, but in an imbecile-fashion? When he tells his mother that the cuts he received from a feral cat came from a wandering prostitute, I sincerely laughed out loud. It doesn’t better his situation, it just turns him into a victim, which is Ignatius greatest desire.
RM: That’s true. This book was definitely ahead of the curve on performative outrage. Ignatius gets by (gets farther than it seems like he should) because he operates so erratically. He’s got a high education and a low animal cunning, but not any actual intelligence.
CMS: I do love that he calls artwork that he dislikes “abortions.” I’d like to co-op that. But more importantly, I need someone to explain his fucking valve to me. Is this a colostomy bag situation?
CH: Hahaha! He eats near-constantly and overwhelms his stomach’s ability to take in food. If the valve is too narrow it can block his food from reaching his stomach. He would have indigestion. It’s something that would be surgically corrected in a child—so I believe it’s another opportunity to show that his growth as a human is stunted. Perhaps symbolically? He’s gassy. But yes, it is definitely a physical ailment that he uses to be the victim, and often.
RM: It gives him reason to complain and emotionally blackmail people into letting him go home. As a matter of fact, my valve is starting to malfunction right now…
CMS: My valve got all out of whack while reading this book.
Would you describe CoD as a voice-driven, plot-driven, character-driven, or a combination? How is it successful, and where does it fall short?
CMS: Voice-driven and character-driven more than anything. Everyone’s ambition is pretty clear. We know why they are doing the things they are doing, but I’m leaning towards voice-driven because a lot of the narrative work is done through dialogue and dialect. I felt like the book was at its strongest when little details came together, such as the book falling into the hands of the Night of Joy and George using the hot dog wagon to store the nudie photos. It falls short when it diverts from Ignatius or the Night of Joy.
RM: Definitely voice-driven for me, but it’s still so crafted. I was so impressed by the handoffs in the book, when we see Ignatius through the eyes of someone who hasn’t yet met him, then it switches to Ignatius’ perspective in the next sentence. Or when we’d see a scene unfold, then read Ignatius’ journal entry about it. There really isn’t much plot. I thought paying back the man whose house they ran into would be more of a plot-driver, but I didn’t find myself *missing* it.
CH: Voice and character, character-voice? I see these as difficult to break apart in this book. So much of what is important in the book comes through the voice of the characters. There is no growth. These characters have done exactly what they do on the page for their entire lives. I see this as a window into a very quirky world. Southern coastal cities have strange characters. They seem to suck them into a vortex. They do strange things because they are cosmically affected. As a reader it’s almost voyeuristic in a way. You could strip away all plot and still just read what these folks are doing because the oddity of it is entertaining. It is interesting because of the voice, which is totally unique out of necessity. Because New Orleans as a city is entirely unique.
RM: Yeah, you’re right about Southern coastal cities. I’m pretty familiar with that New Orleans/Biloxi/Bay St. Louis track. The culture, the landscape—once you spend a long time in it, the rest of the country seems kind of imaginary.
CMS: It’s interesting to think about, because while the voice and oddities were unique, that didn’t mean I found them compelling or fun. A lot of the time, I was mostly annoyed. I just wanted everyone to shut up for a few pages or so.
How does the pacing of this book work for you? Toole fought against editors seeking to trim the novel’s length. Do you feel like it should have been shorter/longer?
CMS: Toole was a tool for fighting that. I truly believe this book could have been cut in half. As I mentioned above, the dialogue does a lot of the narrative work and the majority of it was not needed. It got to the point where I was skipping large chunks of it because it was the same shit over and over again.
RM: There were times where I thought “jeez, I’ve still got a long way to go,” but I still enjoyed reading it.
CH: This could be lost on an editor from the Northeast, of course, and seems did happen to Toole a couple of times. And, of course, it needs mentioning that if Walker Percy didn’t push it forward, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.
RM: Right? The whole thing is so sad to me. Even after he died, I think his mother is the one who kept shopping it around. I’m interested in his other book, Neon Bible, which he didn’t even want published.
They say that tragedy is underdeveloped comedy. How do the tragic and the comic work together in this book?
CMS: I felt like the tragedy of this book was limited because we were meant to look down on all these characters. It seemed as though everyone’s circumstance was a product of their own nonsense (with the exception of Jones), and because a lot of situations seemed to resolve themselves (such as Ignatius running away to New York), I didn’t feel any real sense of doom.
RM: I felt super bad for his mom. All she’s trying to do is find a scrap of happiness, and it seems like she’s done everything she possibly can for Ignatius. Even though these characters are such lampoons, Ignatius’ mom, Mr. Levy, Jones, and Mancuso still felt really human to me.
CMS: Yes. That poor woman. She should have ripped his valve right out of his abdomen.
CH: The mother is the enabler as well! She has grown this beast of Ignatius in her bathtub and keeps a bottle of moscato in her oven to cope (we all do)! There is tragedy in the relationship of the material to the writer, his relationship with New Orleans, his own mother, his schooling in New York, the initial non-acceptance of his work by New York editors, and his own struggles with possible mental-illness. We ended up with a book that couldn’t be pared by the writer. The humor of the situation is there in the characters and the landscape, but there is also desperation.
RM: It all feels a little Shakespearean, doesn’t it? I think of Mancuso, wearing ridiculous costumes and camping out in a mildew-ey bathroom to try to climb the ladder in his career. It’s something we can all relate to—doing something ridiculous on the short term in hopes of a long term benefit—Toole just stretches it to a laughable extreme.
CMS: Totally Shakespearean… without the payoff. Down with Ignatius. Down with the lot of these people.
What role does the location play in CoD? If you’ve never been to New Orleans, how’d it do so far as painting the scene, and do your conceptions of NOLA play into that? If you have been, did you feel the novel got it right?
CMS: Outside of Ignatius dressing like a pirate to sell hot dogs in the Quarter, did it really matter at all that this took place in New Orleans? Sure, the contrast of dialect and diction was vital to compare the “educated” Ignatius with those around him, but I don’t know. I didn’t really care either way. This could have taken place anywhere in the south.
RM: The setting felt less important than I thought it would be, though it does help, mechanically. Like, there’s a crazy place where he doesn’t want to go, but he has to (the Quarter). I guess if you want to stretch it, the Quarter could seem like the woods in Midsummer Night’s Dream, you know, this wild, magical place where everything gets twisted up.
CH: This book wouldn’t have been possible in the same form/voice/diction if set in another city. I mentioned this above, but New Orleans is different than Savannah or Charleston. There are different accents and eccentricities. Sure, we could call them all southern, coastal cities, but the dynamics of the populations are different. The book wouldn’t be right coming from Mobile. It would be like saying Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil could happen in Biloxi.
RM: That’s true. The “vagrant” thing feels particularly New Orleans. New Orleans culture values hanging out more than it values corporatism, and that’s rare. Though gentrification, etc., are certainly still a problem, New Orleans isn’t seeing the explosive growth of Charleston or Nashville. Which is a good thing, I just wonder why that is.
CMS: That’s interesting to hear. Like, I know both of you have a southern twang in the way you speak, and that each is different and specific to where you grew up, but I wouldn’t know how to differentiate it on paper. A southern accent is still a southern accent to me. Me? Oh, I have a ghoulish accent.
This novel does a lot with concepts of race, decency, pornography, economic class, etc. Do you think a book like this could be written today? If not, why? If so, what would be different and what would remain the same?
CMS: No, if only because everyone in this book is a caricature of something else. Like I said, the most interesting and original part of the book for me were the letters back and forth between Ignatius and Myrna, and his overwhelming desire to really stick it to her. You could definitely write the INCEL DIARIES using a large portion of this, but it would require a different kind of violence, and a Richard Spencer type. The Jones stuff would NOT fly, nor would the homophobic ways of attacking Ignatius’ pride.
RM: All this trouble over some high schoolers buying a few nudie pics feels so quaint, haha. Toole finished drafting this book sometime in the 60’s, so it feels superbly woke for the time period. Jones’ perspective of reality is probably the most accurate of all the characters. In the chapter where Ignatius leads the revolt in Levy Pants, he’s so out of touch with the workers in a way that feels familiar to a lot of attitudes today. I think CoD’s critiques are excellent, but the book is so simultaneously subtle and outrageous, I’m not sure how it’d be received in 2019.
CH: There are moments in this book that feel impossibly modern. The same prejudices that we see today are shown true in A Confederacy of Dunces. Jones would still be wary of the law and a shitty bar owner would still hold his job over his head for low wages. An overeducated, white, thirty-something would still have grandiose delusions about their worth in society. They would write manuscripts in stacks and believe that the world was just not on their level. Minkoff would live in Brooklyn and think that the rest of the country believed (or should believe) exactly what she believes. The inheritors of a company would watch it run into the ground while they worry about getting exercise and self-fulfillment. That said, it is also a snippet of time in a particular city. Exactly the same? No. But could a book take on the same content fifty years later, of course. That’s why the book is still relevant. That’s why people continue to read it.
CMS: I only read it because you two picked it, haha. But I agree with that sentiment. It does feel mean-spirited, and I don’t know how receptive people would be to that from a rhetorical standpoint, but I do think holding a mirror to society using characters like these could be a really fun thing set in 2019.
Rating? Final thoughts?
CMS: I’m giving it a 2.5. It made me laugh out loud a handful of times. It was a wild ride, but I’m a little disappointed that Ignatius didn’t meet a more Shakespearian demise, and I could do without all the fucking dialogue. I don’t think I’d recommend this to anyone or bother to read it ever again.
RM: Caleb! I’m shocked! I loved CoD, even though a lot of the plot pieces felt a little obligatory. Every sentence felt electric, stretched as far as it could go, and the dialogue rules. 5 for me.
CH: Awwwe, boo. I’m giving it 5. The book is incomparable and essential to southern lit. I love a character, and this one has plenty.
THE ATTENDEES
CALEB MICHAEL SARVIS is the author of Dead Aquarium (Mastodon Publishing 2019), the senior fiction editor for Bridge Eight Press, and co-host of the Drunken Book Review Podcast. His work can be found in Volt, Hobart, Split Lip, Saw Palm, and others.
RILEY MANNING is an associate editor for Bridge Eight Press. His work can be found glued to the walls of your childhood home.
C.H. HOOKS is the author of the novel, Alligator Zoo-Park Magic. He teaches at the College of Coastal Georgia.
GRACE LANOUE was noticeably absent from this episode. Probably because she hates all of you. Probably because a lobster stole her laptop. Probably because her valve/tappen exploded.
Is vape-pen short for valve/tappen?
