A Confederacy of Dunces (1969/1980) by John Kennedy Toole: If nothing else, A Confederacy of Dunces possesses one of the saddest origin stories in American publishing history. New Orleans writer and academic John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 in his early 30's.
His mother persistently kept trying to get editors to read this novel for the next decade. As detailed in the introduction to this edition by Walker Percy, she finally got Percy to look at it in the late 1970's. Percy was suitably impressed. A Confederacy of Dunces would be published in 1980, to nigh-universal critical acclaim and tremendous sales.
The focus of the novel is one of the most comically grotesque of literary comic-grotesques, Ignatius J. Reilly. Morbidly obese, possessed of awesomely bad fashion sense, possessed of horrifyingly deficient personal hygiene... these are just a few of the 30ish man-child's attributes.
He hates the modern world with a passion and longs for the reinstatement of medieval values. He masturbates while thinking of idyllic childhood days with his (now) dead dog. He gets violently ill while travelling in public transportation. He pontificates, prevaricates, and fantasizes about lashing his female enemies about the genitalia. He's homophobic, heterophobic, bigoted, and lazy almost beyond belief. He's a Mama's Boy who despises his mother.
One of the truly odd things about the novel is that while Reilly is a parody of certain academic "types" (his dissertation stalled out despite his averaging a paragraph a month), he's now weirdly appropriate for our Internet Outrage Era. He's immensely judgmental of everyone other than himself. His rage is never far from the surface. He's a coward and a bully. He even loves Batman. Jesus, would he have been a hoot while Game of Thrones was ending.
Reilly supplies much of the comic horror of the novel, though certainly not all of it. Major characters and minor struggle through a comically infernal New Orleans. Reilly's mother forces him to finally get a job after an auto-related disaster at the beginning of the novel. Reilly's voyage through the workplace supplies the plot thread; Reilly's desire to one-up his long-distance female nemesis/soul-mate Myrna Minkoff in sparking various political "revolutions" lays comic waste to everything around him.
Set-pieces involving Reilly's time at a dilapidated clothing factory, his adventures at a run-down bar, his speaking engagement at a gay party, and his adventures selling hot dogs from a cart while dressed as some sort of pirate really need to be experienced rather than synopsized.
A Confederacy of Dunces has famously resisted movie adaptation for decades -- John Belushi and John Candy are only two of the notables attached to failed projects. I'm not sure if a faithful adaptation is possible. Covers for various editions generally try to make Reilly look cute or even cartoony.
But while his appearance is indeed comical, it's also grotesque to the point that it would defeat audience sympathy to, for instance, depict Reilly sucking down hot dogs and then slurping his own face with his enormous tongue, all in the context of someone who does not seem to bathe, or believe in bathing. So Reilly would be turned into a wacky but lovable fat man, and the sharp edges of the novel sanded off. Reilly and his true nemesis, a kicky pyloric valve, should probably be left to the printed page, in all his ragged and horrible glory. Highly recommended.
Can't Get No (2006) written and illustrated by Rick Veitch: Manhattan CEO Chad Roe has a bad day when complainants launch lawsuits against his company and its signature product -- a truly indelible marker. Stock prices drop into the Zero range. Angry victims of the truly permanent marker want Roe's head. It's September 9, 2001 in New York.
Can't Get No is a surreal, often grotesque piece of left-wing agit-prop from writer-artist Rick Veitch. It's also brilliant and, in my comic-reading experience, unique. I've never encountered a comic before in which the odd, often vague blocks of text (no word balloons or, for that matter, directly attributed quotations here) interact with the occasionally grotesque but also splendidly, comically rendered art so as to induce a sort of trance state in the reader.
Pages go by, and the text seems to vanish from one's memory before it can be stored. Veitch has conjured up a graphic novel that reflects the mass-culture wasteland of America and its cancerous hold on individuals and on the planet. I'd hate to see what this book would do to someone truly stoned.
This is a quest narrative in which images carry the weight while the text noodles away in the background, strange and elusive. There's a Theme Park one probably won't forget. And there's Chad Roe, whose body is turned into a canvas early on for a couple of artists interested in those permanent markers.
Don't look for epiphanies or life-changing revelations at the end, though. It seems to me that the point of Can't Get No is that some people simply cannot permanently change. They've already drowned in the toxic, memoryless, money-obsessed melting pot that is America, melting. Highly recommended.
Stardust Memories, written and directed by Woody Allen; starring Woody Allen (Sandy Bates), Charlotte Rampling (Dorrie), Jessica Harper (Daisy) and Marie-Christine Barrault (Isobel) (1980): "Tell funnier jokes!", the aliens tell filmmaker Sandy Bates during this movie. Bates is plagued by the feeling that he needs to move beyond comedy into more meaningful drama. Of course, Allen himself was plagued by the same feelings in the late 1970's, which led to the depressing, Bergmanesque Interiors (1978), which Allen did after his biggest commercial and critical success, Annie Hall.
And pretty much everybody hated Interiors.
Stardust Memories uses Bates's attendance of a weekend celebration of his movies at the Jersey Shore Hotel Stardust as the loose frame for a tour through Bates's memories, dreams, nightmares, and creative problems. It's a riff on Fellini's 8 1/2, and Allen and his casting director fill the movie with grotesques. This is one of the ugliest, weirdest looking crowd of extras and minor roles ever assembled. Is this how Bates and, by extension Allen, views his fans and critics? Good question.
But the movie also pokes and prods the pretensions of Bates, who is not, the film also seems to suggest, the deep thinker he wants to be. There are some very funny setpieces throughout this film. There are also some tedious sections. The whole thing seems fascinating but somewhat inorganic, though the ending clarifies a lot of the prior murkiness. Recommended for Woody Allen fans.
