My fish-catching skills have been a bit off. I’ve been to five states and I’ve caught fish in three, which means I’m batting .600: Great for baseball, not so much for fishing. On the other hand my state visiting skills are coming right along. I’ve definitely improved my reading. Preparing for a state I read new stuff and re-read very good stuff I sometimes don’t remember I’ve read before. And I have an excuse to read trash too. Reading in anticipation of a visit may be the best way to read.
The internet helps, and I’ve taken to searching for books on lists like Ten Best Books about Louisiana!, and 100 Books You Need to Read About the South! Some of the lists are good. I especially like this one. Some of the lists are peculiar. They start well enough with The Awakening and Confederacy of Dunces, plus a Dave Robicheaux novel, but then veer off track into bodice rippers. There are a lot of lurid covers for Louisiana novels.
And Interview with the Vampire is on every list. I just don’t get it.
I hadn’t read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). The novel is set among well-to-do Creoles, with the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, as the interloper from the old Kentucky bluegrass country. She’s beautiful, throws the best dinner parties, and every man in New Orleans worships at her feet, but domestic duty keeps Edna from full self-realization so she drowns herself. It’s a pretty short novel.
In some ways it’s a bit like Madame Bovary (eats rat poison) and Anna Karenina (throws herself under a train), but with a big difference: both Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina follow their inclinations, are abandoned by their lovers, and off themselves out of shame and despair. While Edna follows some inclinations and finally despairs, the two aren’t particularly connected and she’s not ashamed. She just refuses to put up with her lot. Readers often see The Awakening as feminist, and maybe oppression of a sort is the source of Edna’s dissatisfaction, but it could also be because of her unsatisfied passion for Robert, or maybe she’s just nuts. There’s some ambiguity, and nuts is certainly possible. It’s not uncommon after all for folk to live lives of quiet desperation without drowning themselves.
If you’re looking for novels to label as feminist The Awakening might strike your fancy, but I’m not convinced it would be my first choice. There are too many problems with Edna’s suicide. Does a woman fail in some important way because she abandons her children? Yes, of course, and the same is true for a man. That men do so more often is no excuse. Edna is troubling because in part she is wrong, and because of the novel’s late 19th century Naturalism any certain answer about Edna is unsatisfactory. The author’s neutrality makes the book both better and more difficult, but I suspect that Ms. Chopin would be surprised by the notion that Edna’s suicide is explained by some broader context.
I hadn’t read Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1947) either, and it seems to have fallen off of a lot of the lists. Strictly speaking, it’s as much about Louisiana generally as New Orleans. It’s set against the backdrop of Huey P. Long, Governor Willie Stark in the novel, but it’s really about Stark’s right-hand-man, Jack Burden, a Louisiana aristocrat who has decamped from his birthright to work for the dark side. Maybe it’s fallen off the lists because within the first few pages you get the N-word from the protagonist, but its notions are what they are, and are certainly true for 1930s Louisiana. Maybe it’s fallen off the lists because it’s a big rambling book with a few too many Luke-I-Am-Your-Father moments: it depends on surprises, so it’s uneven and contrived from time to time.
It’s good though, and some critics declare it as our best political novel, which seems a bit like declaring a reliever our best left-handed set-up man. I suppose it’s because they feel a need to justify their fondness for it.
Louisiana divides culturally into Creole New Orleans, the wealthy planters along the Mississippi, the Baptist Appalachian north, and the Catholic Cajun coastline. Overlay that with African Americans who themselves are divided among downtown and uptown: Creole mixed race descendants of free people of color and the descendants of rural slaves. Nobody ever played those divisions better than Huey P. Long, and that manipulation of the herd, herds rather, for political ends is what Willie Stark is all about. And Willie Stark’s ends, unlike say Huey P. Long’s ends, are mostly good (even if the means are pretty rough and tumble). Of course both Long and Stark ultimately come to a violent end. Luke-I-Am-Your-Father.
But politics aside, Jack Burden, cynical and disengaged, is a peculiarly modern hero not much different than the hero of The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling, cynical and disengaged, a peculiarly modern hero not much different than Jack Burden. In broad strokes their stories are the same, Bolling is also an aristocrat (a Bolling no less), their plots are the same, they’re the same. Bolling goes to Chicago on his journey of discovery, not to California like Burden, and unlike Burden the girl goes with him. Pretty much the same girl though.
Oddly, I’d read The Moveigoer (1961) and didn’t remember a thing about it except for one line: “‘Jean-Paul ate some lungs.’” It was Bolling’s much younger half-sister’s line while the kids were eating crabs on a sawbuck picnic table at a fishing camp. I loved that line, and for years after I read it I would tell my kids about it every time we ate crabs because it is a very very funny line for anyone who ever cracked open crabs. I thought I’d read it in a James Lee Burke novel.
When I re-read The Moviegoer I read an appreciation of the novel in The Atlantic by Andrew Santella, in which he admitted to an unhealthy youthful obsession with Binx’s droll disconnected sophistication, which Santella now sees as pretty messed up. Truth is though that Binx never does anything particularly bad, and his movie-going is a metaphor for how he observes his own life. He’s not that disengaged. When it comes time for Binx to be the hero of his movie, if only in a fairly ordinary way, he steps up.
“I did my best for you, son. I gave you all I had. More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women–the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life.”
It is Bolling’s Aunt Emily haranguing him for what she believes is his great failure, but that’s also a pretty good description of Binx Bolling. When it is time for him to prove his lightly worn nobility, he does it. He calls his secretary’s roommate, sure, and you think with horror that he’s going to blow it, but he calls her not about sex but about connection. He is a gentle man. He tells her he’d like to come over Saturday and bring his fiancé. Binx is all right. Binx will be all right.
Ignatius J. Reilly comes into the world with such a strange provenance. John Kennedy Toole had committed suicide after Confederacy of Dunces (1981) was rejected by publishers. Toole’s mother (and you can’t help but wonder at her connection to Ignatius’s mother, Irene), drops the manuscript off with Walker Percy, who was teaching writing at Tulane. Percy gets the novel published by LSU. It posthumously wins the Pulitzer Prize.
I read it first when it was all the rage back in the early 80s, and second ten years back on a trip to New Orleans. It’s a comic novel that holds up well, is often compared to Don Quixote, and since I’m a careless and inattentive reader I’ve found things new in it every time I’ve read it. It can be ponderous, heavy-handed, and sophomoric, but it can also be great fun. Part of the fun now is realizing how the world has changed in my lifetime. Where are these people’s cell phones? There’s a bakery in a department store? There’s a department store? There’s a pants factory in New Orleans? Lan Lee’s pornographic postcards seem so mild, and Burma Jones’ black dialect verges on the racially insensitive. Ooo-wee.
But still, if you can’t imagine the interior of the Night of Joy bar you haven’t been to the French Quarter, and the plot, fantastic and mundane all at once, seems like a flimsy but funny excuse for the people and the places. No novel was ever tied so closely to a city, so that Ignatius’s one earlier attempt to leave New Orleans, an 80-mile bus trip, becomes Dante’s journey: “The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . .”
And Ignatius. The book’s epigram is from Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Is Ignatius a genius? He’s more likely a fool, but then again maybe he’s a madly misdirected genius. He’s certainly not like the rest of us. He also certainly deserves more trouble than he gets–except I feel a bit bad when he’s threatened with the mental ward at Charity. But then again . . . .
What a weird, funny novel, and whatever its unevenness no one can doubt Toole’s appreciation of theology and geometry.
