I, John Kennedy Toole - Kent Carroll and Jodee Blanco

By now, most fiction readers know who John Kennedy Toole was and at least a little about the failed struggle he went through to get his novel A Confederacy of Dunces published. They know that the book did not get published in Toole’s lifetime – and that Toole took his own life. They know that his mother took up the struggle to get the book published after Toole’s suicide, and that with the help of people like Walker Percy and Kent Carroll she finally got that done. And, they know that A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when it was finally published in 1980. These, though, are just the barest of facts about John Kennedy Toole and the prize-winning novel that even today has somewhat of a cult following. What most of us still wonder about is what would drive such a young, talented writer to so deep a despair that he would choose to end his life over continuing to try to interest a publishing house in his work. The man was only thirty-one, after all, when he asphyxiated himself on that deserted backroad near Biloxi, Mississippi.

Now, Kent Carroll (the same Kent Carroll who was so instrumental in getting the book published in the first place) and Jodee Blanco offer their own well-researched insights into the John Kennedy Toole story. I, John Kennedy Toole is billed on its cover as “A Novel Based on a True Story,” and that is exactly how the novel reads. Much of it reads more like a biography than it does a fictional account of Toole’s life, complete with historical references to remind the reader of exactly what was going on in the real world during each of the specific years of Toole’s life being explored at the moment. Too, dialogue between characters is rather limited, with most of it occurring in the second half of the novel, further giving the book its biographical feel.

That the authors chose to use this form to tell Toole’s story is both the good news and the bad news. On the one hand, fiction allows the authors to speculate about what was really going on inside Toole’s head to a degree and a depth that no biography would have allowed them to do. On the other, so much specific biographical information is included, complete with dates, names, locations, and the like, that the reader is left unsure as to where the facts end and the fiction begins. Even the fictional reporter who investigates Toole’s life some twenty-five years or so after his book’s publication, is not completely sure when people are lying to him or just struggling with their personal memories of significant events in Toole’s life.

John Kennedy Toole

What is particularly interesting in I, John Kennedy Toole is the authors’ speculation that Toole’s mental state allowed him to see Ignatius J. Reilly, the obese loudmouth main character from Dunces, as a real person. The fictional Toole often argues loudly in public with the demanding, obnoxious Ignatius, and even feels that he has let the man down by not being able to present his story to the larger world. Especially often on the final road trip that would end with Toole’s suicide were the two verbally at each other’s throats. That Toole suffered from some combination of paranoia, depression, and perhaps schizophrenia seems likely, and the authors take full advantage of that state of mind to explain his short life.

The key relationship in Toole’s life was the one between him and his dominating mother, a relationship that likely exacerbated, at least in part, Toole’s depression problems. If it were not for the efforts of Toole’s mother, his masterpiece would have never been published; that is beyond doubt. That the woman is a very flawed heroine is also beyond doubt, and the authors make that point very clearly in their novel.

Bottom Line: I, John Kennedy Toole is a well-researched novel that fans of Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces will want to read, if for no other reason than their desire to learn  more about what drove the author to such a level of despair. The concept of the novel is a good one, but at times this one can read more like a dry biography than as the fictional account of a doomed man’s life that it is. Still, it is worth the effort, and I recommend it to anyone interested in John Kennedy Toole’s story.