Rating: 
Summary: The Country Book
Review: There is no doubt in my mind that John Kennedy Toole was a colossal genius. "A Confederacy of Dunces" is one of my all-time favourite books (and steadily makes its way up the list each time I re-read it), a rambunctious, comic masterpiece on a par with "Tristram Shandy". While "Neon Bible" could not be more different from "A Confederacy of Dunces", it is for all that something of a treasure. I think of it like this: "A Confederacy of Dunces" is a city novel (specifically, a New Orleans novel). "Neon Bible" is a country novel. The foot has been taken off the accelerator. The pace has gone slack. You get time to smell the coffee, look up at the birds in the trees, float downstream on Huck Finn's raft. All that. The narrator of "Neon Bible" (like John Kennedy Toole at the time of writing, funnily enough) is a kid. He watches various lives fall apart. He attempts to become an adult (he attempts to reconcile himself to adult activity and develop adult understanding), and he fails and he runs away. In lots of ways, "Neon Bible" is like a bird that settles, to your surprise, on your hand. Only you are clumsy (you are Lenny from "Of Mice and Men"). You crush the pretty bird and the end of the book is (quite remarkably, and out of nowhere) the bloody remnants of all those organs and bones crushed between your fingers. You never see it coming. The book reads like a painting. It's so beautiful (and you ask yourself: how did a sixteen year old write this?) you want to touch it, only when you do, the paint gets all over your hands. Everything is ruined. By which I mean to say that it isn't until the end that you realise the peace that pervades the book is - like the little bird in your hand - fragile and easily lost.
Rating: 
Summary: Toole's Many Tools
Review: Toole wrote only two books in his short life, and what markedly differing books they are! THE NEON BIBLE, although published last, was the first of Toole's novels, written when he was just a teen. While it lacks the much-touted satirical humor found in A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, THE NEON BIBLE is a valiant first effort, one deserving of the praise which came to Toole too late to provide the publishing opportunity he longed for. Author Florence King has likened this novel to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. And while it has much in common with the storytelling approach of Harper Lee's book, it more accurate to call THE NEON BIBLE a short, Southern version of A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, told from the male perspective, of course. We listen, interested, as David tells us the story of his childhood in an isolated valley community. In his own way, David learns what Christianity is and is not. And as a young man he makes a difficult but realistic discovery: "They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town." I gave THE NEON BIBLE a 9, not a 10, primarily because of some unexplained anomolies in the plot. For example, he knows his Aunt Mae is not coming back for him, yet he quits his good job anyway, and we never know why. Plot points such as that one make you feel that the character has stopped thinking like a real person for a while. Vastly different from his second, Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, THE NEON BIBLE shows us that Toole had many tools, and that he refined them over the years of his short, unrecognized career. People who speculate about his potential as an author are more than justified. I, too, find myself wondering what we've missed by his absence . . . .
Rating:
Summary: The Overlooked Toole
Review: What is most remarkable, to me, about The Neon Bible is that John Kennedy Toole wrote such a well constructed novel at such an early age. Not only is the novel well constructed, but Toole's observations of society are especially profound. Two passages are quite memorable to me, "She didn't know she was the only thing I ever wanted to have that I thought I'd get," and "They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people..." Toole was obviously born with deep insight and the gift of writing it on paper; it is amazing that he had to struggle so despairingly to get his Confederacy of Dunces published.
I read Confederacy some years ago. I enjoyed it, but I was fully unaware of Toole's back story at the time. After reading The Neon Bible (which I hadn't know about, and discovered quite by accident), I now know that we lost an important literary voice when Toole committed suicide in 1969.
Unlike others, I cannot compare The Neon Bible and To Kill a Mockingbird-To Kill a Mockingbird, for me, is a different book in a completely different voice. The themes of youthful innocence are similar, but where Harper Lee's novel reads with elegance and grace, Toole's is grittier and darker. Regardless, his message is important. Many of us of a certain age remember the South he describes, and as I read I had memories popping out that I, at his age, would never have had the prescience to write about.
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