A Trio of Stunning Books to Read This Spring

By Rebecca Christian

My two favorite definitions of a classic are these: One is that you can feel the author’s soul pressing against the page and the other is that it demands to be reread. Such is the case with a trio of stunners I’m recommending for spring reading.

The first is “A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole, which I somehow managed to miss when it burst onto the literary scene nearly 30 years ago and was hailed as a comic masterpiece.

It tells the story of Ignatius Reilly, a hugely fat, massively maladjusted, frustrated genius of a Momma’s Boy (“Momma, I love my doughnuts!”). The unemployed Ignatius loves to rant at the imbecility of Doris Day and at “American Bandstand” turned up high enough to enrage the neighbors.

This picaresque novel does for a tawdry pre-Katrina New Orleans what Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” did for rambunctious, Depression-era Chicago. The romp begins when Ignatius looks so suspicious waiting for Momma to finish at the doctor’s office while wearing his green hunting cap with earflaps and visor, voluminous tweed pants and supercilious expression (“full, pursed lips ” that at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs”) that an overeager cop hauls him in for questioning. Afterward, an exonerated Momma and Boy calm their nerves into near comas at the Night of Joy bar and then slam their ancient Plymouth into a building. Many a misunderstanding ensues with a cast of Dickensian characters like Myrna Minkoff, our hero’s horny sometime girlfriend.

As in many grotesquely funny books – “The World According to Garp” comes to mind – there’s a contrapuntal theme of melancholy beneath the high comedy. The novel, compulsively readable for something so often taught in colleges, has a certain cache because young author Toole killed himself when publishers rejected it. It fell to his own Momma to schlep it around, and she ultimately succeeded in publication after showing it to novelist Walker Percy. A caveat to the delicate: epic flatulence.

In the same tradition rampages “Between the Bridge and the River,” the surreal 2006 debut novel of late night talk show host Craig Ferguson. It’s almost indescribable, but I’ll try. We Americans have been wanting someone to explain us to ourselves ever since De Tocqueville, and Ferguson obliges in a way that is hilarious, deep, philosophical and cheerfully filthy. He takes on television (likening Larry King’s voice to that of “an aged camel in sexual ecstasy”), snake handlers, Hollywood and a road trip through the rural American South that I can only describe as Monty Python meets Billy Graham.

As the book weaves the interconnected stories of two childhood friends from Glasgow with that of two illegitimate American half- brothers (one an obese, malevolent Svengali, the other a vapid Elvis), Carl Jung turns up occasionally in unlikely getups. This makes the book sound more contrived than it is, and despite the sordidness, there’s redemption in Ferguson’s oft-repeated mantra “Help others.” Fittingly, Dubuque’s Book Club from Hell is reading it.

I’ve saved the best for last: “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy, arguably our greatest living novelist. Again this is a road journey, although there’s scarce humor in McCarthy’s spare and haunting vision of post-Apocalyptic America. Here an unnamed father and son travel the U.S. in the wake of an unspecified catastrophe, probably nuclear war. As the skies rain ash and the duo evades marauding tribes of cannibals in their march to the warm climes of the coast, there’s a bleak poetry in the love between the two and in the father’s attempt to keep his starving son alive: “The boy was so thin. He watched him while he slept. Taut face and hollow eyes. A strange beauty. He got up and dragged more wood onto the fire.” Warning: This one makes “No Country for Old Men,” McCarthy’s savage novel upon which the Oscar-winning killing spree movie was based, look like a grade school picnic.

Dear Reader, if you decide to read these books or already have, I’d love to hear what you think.

Christian, a former Dubuque resident, is a Des Moines writer who may be reached at rebecca.christian@mchsi.com.

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