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.
