Out of the Mouths of Babes...

Before A Confederacy of Dunces, a 16-year-old John Kennedy Toole wrote The Neon Bible, a quiet, but crisply intense bidungsroman about a young boy growing up in a claustrophobic Mississippi town thick with prejudice and religious discord during World War II. Upon finishing the story, Toole viewed the work as juvenile, and filed it away. Decades later, and after Toole posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for A Confederacy of Dunces in 1984, fans of the work and the curious inquired about the possibility of other misbegotten Toole works, with Toole's mother happy to oblige with a work she had discovered among her late son's effects. As W. Kenneth Holditch recounts in the introduction, Toole's mother was determined to have it published to share more of her son's genius, and after some legal tussles and qualms among the Toole family, The Neon Bible saw publication in 1989. Yet, for all the fuss and legal red tape cut to get it published, The Neon Bible skipped the fanfare of accolades and awards that showered Dunces, finding itself once again filed away and forgotten, save for a 1995 Terence Davies-directed film adaptation that too is overlooked these days. 

Usually I approach books written by young authors with some skepticism, but largely pass on reading works that an author never finished, or didn't allow permission to be published. There is something rather...intrusive, lacking about reading incomplete thoughts, ideas, or words that the author wanted to keep private for the sake of their craft. It's why I took some slight delight at people getting pissed about the content of Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman, as with its controversial publication, reader's discovered their beloved "civil rights hero" lawyer Attitcus Finch was "shockingly" revealed as a racist. Sometimes you just don't poke the bear... Toole didn't want The Neon Bible published as he wrote it as a teen and felt the work naive, and as a young writer myself (who has a persistent fear of my own crappy drafts and word vomits being published without my permission), I tend to respect that. 

Well...until I ate my words, poked the bear, and was rewarded with reading one of the best, and most haunting, melancholic meditations concerning the tightrope walk from adolescence to adulthood. 

The ease of the sparse narrative struck me first. My brain was telling me this work was 'incomplete' as the prose had a basic rhythm, but its simplistic flow and the cool, detached narration became a defining charm to the prose as its bareness over the course of reading leaves room to explore and feel the intensity of adolescent observation. Such a flow recalled Alice Walker's The Color Purple, where the simplistic prose reflects Celie's lack of education, but also allows us to settle into an intimate connection to Celie's plight, bringing us closer to her as a character, and understanding her growth with the dialogue becoming more advanced over the course of the book as Celie matures. For The Neon Bible, we settle into a similar intimacy, this towards a young voice who sees from Toole's point-of-view and harbors the same intense mortality and curiosity. Yet, this young voice is not so much triumphing over adversity, but more so witnessing the slow sloughing off of his innocence and his reaction to it.

It's quite impressive a teenager, a mere 16-year-old, would be so aware of the insular, prejudiced attitudes that infiltrates a small town --- along with the narrow-minded, disparate nature of America at large --- and even be astute enough to not engage in it, while write so clearly about it. 

"But I knew the way the people in town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car an told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. you had to think what your father thought all this life, and that was what everybody thought."

The Neon Bible dwells in a similar school of one of my favorites, Carson McCullers, where the main narrator --- a loner by choice --- observes his bleak surroundings in a matter-of-fact, wisen tone, totally subtracted within the cocoon of personality that is their small homestead. Toole though forgoes the kooky hallmarks that largely adorn the Southern Gothic cannon --- dodging to replicate McCullers weirdos or Flannery O'Connor's grotesque humanoids --- instead crafting characters within a bio-dome of intimate realism that is without frill to where most characters are realized in mere sentences. If the characters become grotesque, its by their outlandish actions, not because they were drawn that way. I was in a thrall to how Toole could so coolly and cleanly describe his characters, and not come across as just skimming the surface. 

Each chapter covers a memory of the main character (who is referred to as David), beginning with the arrival of his Aunt Mae, a worn-down former show girl who turns heads in town due to her unconventional attire, and upfront demeanor, but who grows close to David and influences him to see beyond the borders of his small town. David's weary mother and domineering father are present, but are distant figures as David feels affection for them even at their worst, but feels little kinship or love as they too have difficulty showing it. David's father soon leaves the narrative when he heads off to Europe to fight in World War II, alleviating some of the stifling autocratic pressure in David's midst. When his father doesn't return, this tragic event leads his mother to mentally disintegrate, the act becoming her undoing in the end. 

David orbits these adult figures, mostly absorbing their actions, keen to not replicate them, while trying to make sense of it all with quiet and sensitive perception. At times, David can come across as unreliable or even short-sighted, but there would be a line, or a emotion he'd describe that made him quite 'there', most of it nothing short of heartbreaking: the sagging, threadbare house they occupy reflecting how exhausted and lacking his family is; the internal flickers of hope of first love, extinguished during his brief moment of intimacy with a girl visiting town; his constant retreats to a room that houses a toy train that becomes rusted over the years, mirroring the erosion of his growing discontentment, loss of innocence, and fears of stagnation. Just these simple scenes and interactions encompass so much staggering, aching emotion. 

To not spoil much, but the final chapters where David is left in an such an uncertain limbo, where the last strings of innocence slip through his fingers, are about some of the the most haunting and heartbreaking set of chapters I've ever read. It takes a real talent to be able to evoke so much in a small economy of words, and Toole truly excels at it (and at 16...!).

I admit the title at first kept me away from reading this, later, its odd incongruity reeling me in. Toole once showed his mother an enormous neon sign of an open book with "Holy Bible" and church's name emblazoned on its pages. Both were amused at the 'tacky ostentation' of the display of a sacred text being utilized in such a garish way. The Neon Bible derives it's name from this sighting, representing the two faces of religion: it's persistence in religion's push for flashy pageantry in the face of propriety, and its relentless hypocrisy. For this, I can glean why The Neon Bible didn't sail over well upon publication as its critiques at religion (more specifically the Bible Belt evangelical), while a bit on the nose, still blister truth about small town bible beating. 

In David's town, the showmanship of religion is defined by the tent revival event that rolls in one summer, sparking David's inner search for faith and inner reflection. His faith then becomes challenged by the hardships surrounding him and the town's tyrannical preacher and his destructive hypocrisy. 

"When he wanted to send people out of town, they went, especially if they didn't belong to the church. The preacher was the head of the people that decided who was going to the state institutions like the crazy house and poor folks' asylum. [...]

I couldn't think about anything else when I thought about those two driving away and the preacher telling everybody after how he helped the town and helped a poor woman. But, he would say, it was only the Christian thing to do, and any good Christian would leap at doing such a thing. I was getting tired about what the preacher called Christian. Anything he did was Christian, and the people in his church believed it, too. If he stole some book he didn't like from the library, or made the radio station play only part of the day on Sunday, or took somebody off to the state poor home, he called it Christian. I never had much religious training, and I never went to Sunday school because we didn't belong to the church when I was old enough to go, but I thought I knew what believing in Christ meant, and it wasn't half the things the preacher did."

Davies has an interesting take on the book, as he said in a Village Voice interview that he saw the book as an ode to failure, or more accurate, American failure and its despised response to it as a society geared on projecting success. Knowing that Toole himself felt a failure when his manuscripts weren't well-received in his lifetime (a fact that lent to why he took his own life at the age of 32), this book in particular pains with a similar dejection, frustration. An adrift somberness that hints towards Toole and David being one in the same: two young boys rushed into being men, both scrambling together some sense, some peace, some direction amidst a stifled, contradictory existence. In the time of WWII, a time that trumpeted American superiority, victory and valor, Toole and David are both apathetic about it due to the failures of humanity surrounding them. Maybe this is why Toole denied his first novel foray. Maybe he exposed himself, his fears of failure, of American society more in this work than he could care to admit? 

Failure, or not, Toole's potential and talent hovers heavy over The Neon Bible, passed onto his avatar David, this in hopes maybe he would find a better way out of his predicaments than he could.