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.”

“For the devoutly Catholic O’Connor, the peacock was a symbol for the wonders that lie just beyond the realm of vision, the possibility of the divine. They were a link between the physical and the ethereal worlds, the same connection that she explored in her fiction, of the freakish qualities of humanity as a spiritual journey made manifest.”

“What are we searching for in Oxford, amid the Yazoo clay? There is something about Faulkner’s work that stirs the souls of Southerners, something that reads deeply and essentially true.”