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Butterfly Cartoon Images Biography
Reviewed:
Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, by Cory MacLauchlin, Da Capo Press, 2012
Is A Confederacy of Dunces even a good book?
Opening line: "A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head." Something's wrong there. A head is not a balloon.
Nor is anyone's tongue flabby, though a few pages on, the man with the balloon head sends a "flabby pink tongue" across his mustache, gathering cake crumbs.
Nor is "Ignatius screamed" an appropriate dialogue tag to use nineteen times. Nor is it really very wise for a white Southerner writing in 1963 to go for laughs via the rendering of African-American dialect (there are a lot of ooo-wee's in this book). And on and on—so much of it is over the top, in questionable taste, in bad taste, cartoonish, unrestrained, and distorted. It's a novel broken out in hives.
If in the early 1980s you were a young person in the South trying to learn how to write, John Kennedy Toole's novel might have looked like the latest, greatest bad influence. That it won a Pulitzer in 1981 was part of the problem—the Southern bookshelf already sagged with highly decorated writers who are deadly to imitate. Faulkner: There is no surer way to sound like a jackass. Flannery O'Connor: Thanks to her, no more prosthetic limbs in your stories forevermore. There is all this weight of grandness—the gothic storylines, the round vowels. A kid simply trying to learn to write might have found a friendlier model in someone like Raymond Carver, whose striking virtues are restraint, spareness, and a very prominent quietness. No balloon-like body parts here, and few exclamation points. The prose suggests a method of subtraction: Write a page, then cross most of it out. It's like cleaning your garage every morning. It's hygienic. There's a safety in it, too, because the student of subtraction is less and less likely to commit an offense against taste. If he overdoes it—if he subtracts too much—well, the extreme result is silence, which is no offense to anyone.
Okay, I'm wrong. But you can't learn everything at once. And if you were this kid who read A Confederacy of Dunces twenty years ago and judged it to be too much in every way, I urge you to read it again, because it's magnificent. Yes, it is loud, and there's a theatricality—the characters shout at one another like actors in the days before microphones, and their features are outlined with black pencil so as to be read from the very back row, through cigar smoke. You won't learn restraint from this book. What you can do is laugh at the sentences.
Butterfly Cartoon Images Biography
Reviewed:
Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, by Cory MacLauchlin, Da Capo Press, 2012
Is A Confederacy of Dunces even a good book?
Opening line: "A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head." Something's wrong there. A head is not a balloon.
Nor is anyone's tongue flabby, though a few pages on, the man with the balloon head sends a "flabby pink tongue" across his mustache, gathering cake crumbs.
Nor is "Ignatius screamed" an appropriate dialogue tag to use nineteen times. Nor is it really very wise for a white Southerner writing in 1963 to go for laughs via the rendering of African-American dialect (there are a lot of ooo-wee's in this book). And on and on—so much of it is over the top, in questionable taste, in bad taste, cartoonish, unrestrained, and distorted. It's a novel broken out in hives.
If in the early 1980s you were a young person in the South trying to learn how to write, John Kennedy Toole's novel might have looked like the latest, greatest bad influence. That it won a Pulitzer in 1981 was part of the problem—the Southern bookshelf already sagged with highly decorated writers who are deadly to imitate. Faulkner: There is no surer way to sound like a jackass. Flannery O'Connor: Thanks to her, no more prosthetic limbs in your stories forevermore. There is all this weight of grandness—the gothic storylines, the round vowels. A kid simply trying to learn to write might have found a friendlier model in someone like Raymond Carver, whose striking virtues are restraint, spareness, and a very prominent quietness. No balloon-like body parts here, and few exclamation points. The prose suggests a method of subtraction: Write a page, then cross most of it out. It's like cleaning your garage every morning. It's hygienic. There's a safety in it, too, because the student of subtraction is less and less likely to commit an offense against taste. If he overdoes it—if he subtracts too much—well, the extreme result is silence, which is no offense to anyone.
Okay, I'm wrong. But you can't learn everything at once. And if you were this kid who read A Confederacy of Dunces twenty years ago and judged it to be too much in every way, I urge you to read it again, because it's magnificent. Yes, it is loud, and there's a theatricality—the characters shout at one another like actors in the days before microphones, and their features are outlined with black pencil so as to be read from the very back row, through cigar smoke. You won't learn restraint from this book. What you can do is laugh at the sentences.
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
Butterfly Cartoon Images
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