I, John Kennedy Toole

February 15, 2020
A fictional imagining of the troubled life of John Kennedy Toole and the selling of his Pulitzer-winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.Toole's story is well-known via biographies and appreciations of Dunces, published more than a decade after his suicide in 1969 at the age of 31. Claiming in their introductory note that personal details of the artist's life proved too elusive for a standard biography, the co-writers have fashioned a novel of their own about the man called Kenny. At once a shy, lonely person and a "gifted mimic" who enjoys mocking people, he is controlled by his mother, Thelma, who restricts her talented son from normal boyhood activities and accompanies him on his dates with a girl he can't kiss in his mom's presence. Though even in death Kenny is not free of Thelma's helicopter presence--her pestering salesmanship led to his obsessed-over book's publication--he mostly succeeds as an instructor at Columbia University and other schools. His pivotal moment comes when Simon & Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb, while finding much to recommend Dunces, rejects it. His dream destroyed, Kenny slowly sinks into mental illness, ultimately fixating on his fictional alter ego, "instigator extraordinaire" Ignatius T. Reilly, as an actual person. As editor-in-chief at Grove Press, Carroll was instrumental in foisting the bestselling paperback edition of Dunces on the world. He himself is a character in this entertaining if oddly assembled book, which features a made-up journalist who becomes obsessed with Toole's story. While the authors do their best to capture their subject in all his eccentricities, their attempt to approximate his interior voice is pure folly. And their failure to provide a basic plot summary or excerpts from Dunces is puzzling. A lightly likable depiction of an ill-fated American master. Mind the credibility gap.

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February 17, 2020
This boisterous fictional take on the life and career of author John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969) from Carroll, a publishing veteran, and Blanco (Please Stop Laughing at Me, a memoir) is a bit of a mixed bag. The authors do a good job depicting the family life of only child Toole in New Orleans, in particular the tension between the sensitive, gifted Toole and his overbearing mother, Thelma, who ensured the publication of her son’s masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, after his suicide. Simon & Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb, who rejected Dunces (because it “isn’t really about anything”), is fairly portrayed, though references to the 1968 novel Superworm, a highly touted but now forgotten Gottlieb acquisition, suggest his editorial judgment wasn’t always perfect. Book industry insiders will enjoy the account of how Carroll, then an editor at Grove Press, negotiated the paperback rights for Dunces with LSU, netting an instant bestseller after the book won the Pulitzer in 1981. Less satisfying is an undeveloped subplot involving a fictional reporter seeking to write about Toole. The authors also indulge in unnecessary historical scene setting (“in August of 1963, as Beatlemania continued to entrance the country, President Kennedy and the First Lady mourned the death of an infant son”). This love letter to Toole fans offers plenty of insights into the tragic literary figure.

May 15, 2020
A Confederacy of Dunces, Jonathan Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is an American classic, but its author, who committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 31 before his greatest work was published, remains an enigma. Distinguished publisher Carroll, who published Toole's novel, and coauthor Blanco attempt to pierce the mystery by telling the story of Toole's life in a compelling "nonfiction novel," meshing fact and fiction in pursuit of elusive truths. Ignatius J. Reilly, the boisterous, eccentric, and opinionated main character of A Confederacy of Dunces, leaps from the pages of Toole's then-unpublished manuscript to serve as the writer's id. Reilly is ever present as Toole navigates his way through a stint in the military, graduate school in New York City, life in New Orleans, and a cross-country road trip that precedes his death. Running parallel to Toole's narrative is the story of how Dunces got published?thanks to Toole's mother, who persistently championed the book after her son's death?and its legacy, which is explored by a fictional newspaper reporter. The dramatization of publishing-world machinations is as fascinating as Toole's life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)