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.”

“Crews’s childhood was one move after another, spurred by a string of catastrophes both crop and family-related. Crews could never point to a single house that contained his childhood, and it plagued him. The absence of a single home place, Crews wrote, was a ‘rotten spot at the center of my life.’ It made him feel anchorless, forever denied a spot to moor his memories.”

“The birds of Hera squawking alongside the tree frogs in middle Georgia captured something essential about the contrasts in O’Connor’s persona: a southern woman fluent in the graces of society, whose fiction portrayed a singular, searing vision.”