Unpleasant and demanding, she—and not her unlucky son—is the real hero of this engagingly told footnote to American literary...
An oddly entertaining biography of a tormented writer and his unlikely legacy.
John Kennedy Toole’s story has become the stuff of publishing legend: Boy wonder writes a dense, picaresque novel called A Confederacy of Dunces (a “rambling story about an obese, flatulent man”); no one wants to publish same; despondent boy wonder commits suicide; boy wonder’s mother recruits famous writer to find a publisher for the manuscript; the novel is published and becomes a bestseller. As Nevils and Hardy—former writing students of NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu at Louisiana State University—demonstrate, the truth of the story is considerably more complex. Born in 1936, Toole grew up to be a complex, self-hating man—but one whose talents were clearly appreciated. Far from being shunned as a provincial nobody by the powers that be in New York publishing, as the Toole myth would have it, the author of Confederacy was taken seriously at many houses (including Simon & Schuster, whose chief editor Robert Gottlieb devoted considerable time to suggesting ways in which the ungainly novel could be trimmed and focused). Too close to the work at that point, Toole was psychically unprepared to undertake revisions. His suicide, however, was not the response to rejection that his mother claimed it to have been; it was instead an escape from a long and gruesome slide into madness. A minor author by any measure, Toole would not merit a book-length study were it not for his whirlwind of a mother, who pressed the manuscript on novelist Walker Percy and hounded him until he arranged for its publication. Thelma Ducoing Toole emerges as a self-absorbed harridan of the first order in this account, conniving and utterly awful, whom everyone connected with Toole’s posthumous good fortune took pains to avoid—but who made that good fortune possible through her unwavering belief in her son’s brilliance.
Unpleasant and demanding, she—and not her unlucky son—is the real hero of this engagingly told footnote to American literary history.Pub Date: June 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-8071-2680-2
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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