A Confederacy of Dunces

 This will be brief.

A Confederation of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is advertised as humorous.

Some background. A publisher was beset by a mother whose son committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 39. He had written a book on Big Chief tablets, and she begged him to read it. He gave in and started the ordeal of having to read the stack of tablets with some of the words practically unreadable. It caught his interest and started laughing at some parts. It became a Pulitzer Prize winning book.

There are seven book clubs all on different days and times at Books on the Bosque. The only one that fits my schedule is on Thursdays at noon. This was the book chosen. It looked interesting so I bought it and got the audio book as well.

I started listening and switched to the paperback. The conversations of some of the characters were so inane I went to the hard copy to skip over them.

Ignatius J. Reily is 35 tall and very fat and has a black mustache. The book starts with him standing outside a store waiting for his mother to come out. He's wearing a large red coat over a blue sweatshirt with a blue muffler under a green hat with ear flaps and heavy boots. He chooses to dress like this because it's comfortable.

A Police patrolman starts asking him what he's doing there. He doesn't answer but gives in his booming voice a diatribe with large words, so the officer decides to arrest him. This draws a crowd and soon the officer is surrounded. An old man starts calling everyone around him communists the police officer panics and arrests the old man.

Ignatios's mother comes out and gets involved with the officer to help the old man, Mr. Claude Robichaux. Officer Mancuso leads Robichaux away. 

Inez, Ignatios's mothers, takes her son into the Joy Bar where the readers become acquainted with a number of weird characters.

Inez has an accident in her car where she plows into the wooden supports of a balcony over a business, she then gets sued by the owner and she has no way to pay the damages. She insists Ignatios get a job. She had used up all of her inheritance to pay for his college and master's degree and he needs to make money.

She spends time with friends and Mr. Robichaux, and they all tell her to admit Ignatios into an asylum. 

Ignatios gets a job at a blue jeans factory and finding out how little everyone is getting paid forms a union which gets him fired. He then starts selling hot dogs in a pirate costume from a cart near the French Quarter of New Orleans.

In both jobs he uses large words and insults everyone, but they don't understand a word he says.

That's as much as I'll give away on the story.

When I went to the book club mostly middle-aged women another elderly man like me and the manager who's a little younger. I wanted to hear what they thought of the book. They started telling some of the antics and were laughing. Then they asked me. I guess I didn't see it like they did.

I told them that Ignatios obviously had Aspergers syndrome, but in 1960 they didn't know what it was. That my daughter has the same problem, and I didn't find it funny. 

Ignatios was arrogant, pompous, and clueless. At the end of the book where he's invited to a costume ball wearing his pirate outfit, they start pushing him into and on top of others thinking they were having a good time at his expense. I could see where others might find that funny I didn't.

One of the ladies said she's read the book three times, when she was younger and laughed through it. A few years later she read it again and thought it was dark humor, and now this time she agreed with me it stopped being funny after she aged and had more life experience.

My life experience was being bullied in Junior High, then teaching 7th and 8th grade English where I made sure there was no bullying in my classes physical or verbal also when I was in the hallways.

I'm afraid I put a damper on the discussion, but they understood my point of view.

The next book the owner doesn't have out yet, but she said it was about two scientists that start working in genetics.