This story covers the period from 1957 to 1953. The setting is rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. It relates the redneck poverty of David whose father drifts from job to job. Respectable folk shun the family because they cannot afford to pay church dues. When the father dies as a GI in Italy, David’s mother goes insane, and he receives care from his Aunt Mae until she resurrects her show business career in Nashville.
Left alone in a small town world of pedestrian violence, one fixture in David’s surroundings is the Southern Baptist Church whose neon sign on Main Street is a garishly coloured page of the Bible. Growing up, he learns of religious, racial, social, and sexual bigotry. The reader is also given an account of David’s awkward attempts at first love.
Observation of southern US small town life is shrewd, direct and painful throughout.
John Kennedy Toole (1937 – 1969) (The Uneasy Afterlife of “A Confederacy of Dunces” | The New Yorker) was born to a middle class family in New Orleans, Louisiana. His posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. Although several people in the literary world admired his writing skills, Toole’s novels were rejected during his lifetime. Due in part to these failures, he suffered from paranoia and depression, and committed suicide at the age of 31.
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176 pages in Grove Press UK
First published 1989
ISBN-13 : 978-1611854985
