Status Updates From South Toward Home: Travels ...

“The punch line here is the same one in the book’s title, which Toole took 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.’”

“Toole’s characters don’t speak; they scream. City life is a constant series of tiny social conflicts and misunderstandings.”

“Faulkner’s New Orleans is a messy watercolor of a place, overrunning with pigment. Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans is steamy, haunted, and claustrophobic, full of nervous creatures and dilapidated boardinghouses; it always seems to be dusk there. The New Orleans that Toole paints in ‘Confederacy’ is a different city altogether, the only place out of the three that I recognize.”