I, JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE

A fictional imagining of the troubled life of John Kennedy Toole and the selling of his Pulitzer-winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.

Toole's story is well-known via biographies and appreciations of Dunces, published more than a decade after his suicide in 1969 at the age of 31. Claiming in their introductory note that personal details of the artist's life proved too elusive for a standard biography, the co-writers have fashioned a novel of their own about the man called Kenny. At once a shy, lonely person and a "gifted mimic" who enjoys mocking people, he is controlled by his mother, Thelma, who restricts her talented son from normal boyhood activities and accompanies him on his dates with a girl he can't kiss in his mom's presence. Though even in death Kenny is not free of Thelma's helicopter presence—her pestering salesmanship led to his obsessed-over book's publication—he mostly succeeds as an instructor at Columbia University and other schools. His pivotal moment comes when Simon & Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb, while finding much to recommend Dunces, rejects it. His dream destroyed, Kenny slowly sinks into mental illness, ultimately fixating on his fictional alter ego, "instigator extraordinaire" Ignatius T. Reilly, as an actual person. As editor-in-chief at Grove Press, Carroll was instrumental in foisting the bestselling paperback edition of Dunces on the world. He himself is a character in this entertaining if oddly assembled book, which features a made-up journalist who becomes obsessed with Toole's story. While the authors do their best to capture their subject in all his eccentricities, their attempt to approximate his interior voice is pure folly. And their failure to provide a basic plot summary or excerpts from Dunces is puzzling.

A lightly likable depiction of an ill-fated American master. Mind the credibility gap.