I thought it was time for some modern literature to come around on the guitar, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the Pulitzer Prize winners I had in my Nearly Infinite Library. (Others in there that I considered (and the reasons for not reading them just now) were Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (slightly longer than what I was looking to read), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (much larger than I was looking for; I would have had trouble fitting it my bag to carry to work), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (more depressing than I was looking for right now), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (not in the mood), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (looks like a snoozer), and Richard Ford’s Independence Day (don’t know much about).) (I also have National Book Award winners like Ha Jin’s Waiting, Dennis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, and Don Delillo’s White Noise on tap, should the Pulitzer prove an insufficiently target-rich literary environment…) And it had a reputation as a funny book. And it is pretty funny, albeit not in the same league as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds. It’s the story of Ignatius Riley, a lazy, overeducated asshole who annoys the living shit out of every single person he crosses paths with (most of whom are even dimmer and less self-aware than the protagonist, though none as irritating). It’s virtues are those of satire rather than a plot that gets more interesting as you go along. It’s also notable as a detailed evocation of a particular time and place (New Orleans in the 1960s), though it wasn’t published (posthumously) until 1980. Though I didn’t love it as much as some swooning critics, I did enjoy it much more than the last literary novel I read with an irritating asshole as the protagonist (J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye). There’s also something almost quaint about a plot point involving the police busting a school pornography ring. Today you have to assume that the average high schooler has access to unlimited pornographic vistas thanks to the wonder of the Internet…
