| Title | : | I, John Kennedy Toole |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1643131931 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781643131931 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 |
| Publication | : | First published May 5, 2020 |
The book traces Toole’s life in New Orleans through his adolescence, his stay at Columbia University in New York, his attempts to escape the burden of his demanding mother and his weak father, his retreat into a world of his own creation, and finally the invention of astonishing characters that came to living reality for both readers (and the author himself) in his prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces.
The other fascinating (and mostly unknown) part of the story is how after a decade of rebuke and dismissal the novel came to a brilliant author, Walker Percy, and a young publisher, Kent Carroll, who separately rescued the book, then published it with verve and devotion.
The novel that almost never came to be went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and continues to sell at a satisfying rate as it winds its way to the 2 million mark. That audience is the happy ending for this brilliant, unrepentant writer, whose only reward before his untimely death was his unending belief in his work and his characters.
I, John Kennedy Toole Reviews
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3.5 stars. Been wanting to re-read A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toilet but decided to read this first to learn more about the author even if it's a fictional account of his life. I found it interesting enough, wasn't bored by the story but wasn't overly excited for it either.
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By now, most fiction readers know who John Kennedy Toole was and at least a little about the failed struggle he went through to get his novel A Confederacy of Dunces published. They know that the book did not get published in Toole’s lifetime – and that Toole took his own life. They know that his mother took up the struggle to get the book published after Toole’s suicide, and that with the help of people like Walker Percy and Kent Carroll she finally got that done. And, they know that A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when it was finally published in 1980. These, though, are just the barest of facts about John Kennedy Toole and the prize-winning novel that even today has somewhat of a cult following. What most of us still wonder about is what would drive such a young, talented writer to so deep a despair that he would choose to end his life over continuing to try to interest a publishing house in his work. The man was only thirty-one, after all, when he asphyxiated himself on that deserted backroad near Biloxi, Mississippi.
Now, Kent Carroll (the same Kent Carroll who was so instrumental in getting the book published in the first place) and Jodee Blanco offer their own well-researched insights into the John Kennedy Toole story. I, John Kennedy Toole is billed on its cover as “A Novel Based on a True Story,” and that is exactly how the novel reads. Much of it reads more like a biography than it does a fictional account of Toole’s life, complete with historical references to remind the reader of exactly what was going on in the real world during each of the specific years of Toole’s life being explored at the moment. Too, dialogue between characters is rather limited, with most of it occurring in the second half of the novel, further giving the book its biographical feel.
That the authors chose to use this form to tell Toole’s story is both the good news and the bad news. On the one hand, fiction allows the authors to speculate about what was really going on inside Toole’s head to a degree and a depth that no biography would have allowed them to do. On the other, so much specific biographical information is included, complete with dates, names, locations, and the like, that the reader is left unsure as to where the facts end and the fiction begins. Even the fictional reporter who investigates Toole’s life some twenty-five years or so after his book’s publication, is not completely sure when people are lying to him or just struggling with their personal memories of significant events in Toole’s life.
What is particularly interesting in I, John Kennedy Toole is the authors’ speculation that Toole’s mental state allowed him to see Ignatius J. Reilly, the obese loudmouth main character from Dunces, as a real person. The fictional Toole often argues loudly in public with the demanding, obnoxious Ignatius, and even feels that he has let the man down by not being able to present his story to the larger world. Especially often on the final road trip that would end with Toole’s suicide were the two verbally at each other’s throats. That Toole suffered from some combination of paranoia, depression, and perhaps schizophrenia seems likely, and the authors take full advantage of that state of mind to explain his short life.
The key relationship in Toole’s life was the one between him and his dominating mother, a relationship that likely exacerbated, at least in part, Toole’s depression problems. If it were not for the efforts of Toole’s mother, his masterpiece would have never been published; that is beyond doubt. That the woman is a very flawed heroine is also beyond doubt, and the authors make that point very clearly in their novel.
Bottom Line: I, John Kennedy Toole is a well-researched novel that fans of Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces will want to read, if for no other reason than their desire to learn more about what drove the author to such a level of despair. The concept of the novel is a good one, but at times this one can read more like a dry biography than as the fictional account of a doomed man’s life that it is. Still, it is worth the effort, and I recommend it to anyone interested in John Kennedy Toole’s story. -
This is an imagining of the short life of John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969) and the life of his masterwork, the manuscript that would become
A Confederacy of Dunces. It's no spoiler to say that his death by suicide would punctuate the life of the book but not end it -- we read about his death in the first chapter. The narrative then leaps back and forth through his life, his relationships and his unsuccessful attempts to publish it in the 1960s at a time when the book's eccentricities didn't suit the publishers of the day.
Thelma, his mother, is one of the more vivid, if unlikable characters in this novel. Domineering, yes, convinced that her boy Kenny is a genius, a literary prodigy, and raises him in her overpowering way, much like the stage mother in the musical "Gypsy", if more neurotic. She is a presence throughout Kenny's life, from his school days to his time as a professor of literature. Also haunting Kenny, more and more, is Ignatius Reilly, the central character of his book, who becomes a real, talkative, and demanding specter who becomes a real presence to him. Perhaps it's not surprising that the book, with this character, would survive Kenny and, in Thelma's hands, the book would make its rounds of publisher's offices anew.
The narrative's back-and-forth in time makes sense here, and the story is careful to peg the narrative in a particular year with particular cultural markers. It's 1980, for example: John Lennon is murdered and Ronald Reagan is elected, a kind of bookmark that helps the reader follow the jumps in time and culture. Thelma's obsessive promotion of the manuscript makes sense as the times have become more ready for this posthumous book, which becomes, as we know, famous. As a fictional biography, it's imaginative but well-grounded in time, place and the publishing industry. -
LACKING TASTE, DECENCY, THEOLOGY AND GEOMETRY
There are a few good books about John Kennedy Toole and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces.” “I, John Kennedy Toole” is not one of them.
It’s not a biography like “Butterfly in the Typewriter.” Nor is it a memoir like “Ken and Thelma.” Instead, it’s what Toole’s protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly might have denounced as an “abortion.”
The book is a disorganized, plodding narrative that adds little to the Toole story. It’s a shame because one of the authors, Kent Carroll, was an editor at Grove Press when it bought the paperback rights to “Confederacy.”
Worse, it disrespects Toole’s memory with fictionalized nonsense. One example: Toole gets an erection thinking about author Flannery O’Connor, who was twelve years older and crippled by a debilitating disease. It also posits that Toole, fastidious, WAS Ignatius, a slob. Toole’s mother and friends have denied this.
In addition, the book’s main premise will be hard for some readers to accept: that Toole deliberately killed himself so he could be famous. Even Ignatius, portrayed as a voice in Toole’s head, was in on the decision. He then came to regret it because Toole was no longer alive to let him out of his manuscript-box coffin.
Carroll’s role in launching “Confederacy” as a Grove paperback is commendable and a worthy addendum to what is already known. But more detail would have been nice, especially since his involvement with the book ultimately cost him his job.
Other than that, it seems that the authors had so little new to offer that they had to resort to fiction. Even that has its limits, given that the book is well padded with national news events from the timeline of Toole’s life.
To Toole fans who who already know the story behind “Confederacy”: This book could seal your pyloric valve. -
Džodi Blanko i Kent Kerol su, isprva, želeli da napišu biografiju glasovitog Džona Kenedija Tula. Međutim, ispostavilo se da nemaju baš toliko materijala, te su odlučili da napišu roman o autoru knjige "Zavera budala". I tako je nastala knjiga "I, John Kennedy Toole" koju sam naprosto morao da pročitam.
Sada se pitam kako su od zanimljivog i dinamičnog života pisca najbolje knjige na svetu uspeli da stvore dosadnu, nezanimljivu, konfuzno napisanu brljotinu kakva je ova knjiga. Stvarno je potrebno mnogo talenta da se napiše nešto u ovoj meri nebitno, nemaštovito, lišeno emocija i loše u svakom aspektu.
Kao da je autorima bio cilj da odvrate ljude od čitanja romana "Zavera budala", a ne obrnuto. -
Sad.
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No one in New Orleans makes gumbo from a Better Holmes and Garden's recipe, but other than that...excellent
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If you like "A Confederacy of Dunces," you need to read this. If you haven't read A Confederacy of Dunces, you need to read it, then read this. Thank me later.
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I began the book and was swept on to complete the first several chapters. What a story. The author is able to complete the missing elements of a triumphant publication "Conspiracy of Dunces." Both tomes complete a single version of an interesting and non neuronormal individual -JKT.
