The Longest Page

My Great White Whale

A mushroom walks into a bar. The bartender looks at it derisively and says, "we don't serve your kind here."

"What's the matter?" the mushroom asks, astounded, "I'm a fungi."

I really wanted to like this book. After reading a string of downers, I was ready for a good laugh, and I had heard that A Confederacy of Dunces was a riot. I actually purchased the novel close to 2 years ago, but for some reason always procrastinated reading it.


Jesus, this book won the Pulitzer Prize? Really? Why? For a novel that is supposed to be "uproariously funny," there sure are very few laughs. If you enjoy laughing at border-line retarded people or the misfortune of imbeciles, maybe this book is for you. For me that's the reason why I hate it: there are no characters that I can find even a remote liking for, nor a redeeming quality. It would work a lot better were it a short story, perhaps. Jack London's In a Far Country is about two loathesome men forced to share a tiny cabin in the Arctic North, and it works; partly because of the story's length, but also because the weaknesses of those two men, as contemptible as they are, are frighteningly plausible, and question the readers' will and willpower. A Confederacy offers no such personalities.

The book's author, John Kennedy Toole, commited suicide before the novel's publication, and if it wasn't for his mother, it would have remained unpublished. But Mama Toole believed her son had written something great, and due to her hard work, the novel found publication close to 10 years later.

I don't want the bad karma that may come with criticizing the work of a dead man, but I have to say: there's no way this book gets the acclaim it doesn't deserve, let alone published, were it not for the fact that the author killed himself. I'm sorry if that sounds callous, but it's true. It's just not that good a book. Again, there are no characters that are the tiniest bit likeable (save maybe for Jones, the black custodian of The Night of Joy nightclub). It's as though the author went out of his way to make every single character as repulsive, as detestable, as possible.

Perhaps that's why it's taken me so long to read. For me, picking up Confederacy is harder than putting on wet socks. I started reading it over a month ago, and I still have just under a hundred pages left. Take into account that the book, though the page count totals roughly 390 pages, is gigantically spaced, and the page borders are almost as spacious on the page as the text is. If this were a regular paperback, I'd be surprised if it clocked in at over 200 pages.

So, mercifully, it isn't as long as Ulysses; if it were, I think I'd kill myself.

It still baffles me how much acclaim the book gets. Of course, I haven't finished it yet, so I probably shouldn't be sounding off on how it's the worst novel ever subjected to mankind. But I don't see a big turnaround coming soon.

What is it? Is there a check for one thousand dollars attached to the back of the book that I don't know about? I hate to be one of those guys: someone who rags on something one cherishes dearly. For example, if someone were to tell me "The Lord of the Rings movies were the worst things I've ever seen in my life," I'd probably dismiss them as mental. But I just don't get this book. I'm tempted to read it again and again until I do, because I can't think of a book that has garnered so much acclaim and which I loathe to my very being. I keep telling myself I'm missing the point -- but I'm afraid there really isn't one (though I do believe the book should be required reading for anyone surfing the Internet). For me it ranks only with Catch-22 in terms of books with a premise (or gimmick) that the novel's length far exceeds.

Then again The Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite novels. So maybe I'm not the best authority on "acclaimed novels with a loathesome protagonist" that are, in fact, garbage.