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. 

O Pioneers!

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman"

O Pioneers! is a love letter to Willa Cather's memories of her native Nebraska homestead and the immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, and French who settled on that vast and blustery land of mystique and melancholy during the 1880s. True to Cather's nature, she christens the novel with an independent and iron-willed heroine by the name of Alexandra Bergson, who after her father's death takes over the family farm, this much to the chagrin and jealousy of her disagreeable older brothers. For approximately 30 years we follow Alexandra and other occupants of the Divide, all of whom are hoping not to 'blow away' on this wild and unpredictable land they call home.

What drives this tale is Cather's picturesque prose. She is by far one of America's greatest minimal wordsmiths. She doesn't need to bleed purple to capture a feeling. Even at its barest, her prose snaps crisp and clean, getting right to the root of emotion. As this is her second book, written in 1913, Cather is still maturing into her style. She doesn't quite handle character development well as she has moments where she tells more than shows, and the characters aren’t as vividly explored as one would want. Timelines are also often skipped because we hear of Alexandra making a success of her farm by sheer gumption and keen, almost scientific planning, but we don't get to experience the toil or the complications she ran into as we're just simply told of it all. It was rare for women in Alexandra's era to accomplish a task of this caliber, and it would've made for great reading and a deeper sense of Alexandra’s character if this wasn't so lightly glossed over.

Still the word magic Cather casts make up for the lightweight action. As stated, Cather's prose is just so damn exquisite and it touches all the senses in the simplest of ways. It leads you by the hand through the yellow fields, points skyward to admire the purple and reds of dusk, turns your attention to the elegance of a duck in motion --- an intimate guided tour it is.

"She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring." 

Novella November: The Love Child

"A love-child, the phrase had surged up from her inner consciousness, and she spoke it without realizing what it implied. It just did express what Clarissa truly was to her---the creation of the love of all her being. It was the truth, and in face of the truth she knew that no one could take the child away. She had saved her."

Being an only child led me to manifest Jasmine. She was a bit older than me, smarter, cooler, owned a pink Corvette, and had luxurious glitter dusted hair that she dragged across the floor. I told anyone who'd listen that Jasmine (yes, she was named after Aladdin's main squeeze) was my sister. My parents played along. They poured extra Kool-Aid for her, set a placemat at our table for her, made sure she was buckled up in the backseat --- for my benefit they entertained this second "daughter".

After some time Jasmine started to become an issue, this when I began to talk about her outside of the comforts of home. Jasmine never went to school with me (she was older and cooler remember?), but I blabbed about her enough to where she became known to my teacher. Little did I know that I had successfully convinced her of Jasmine's existence so much so that when my parents came to a PTA meeting (yes, my parents actually went to those) my teacher asked about Jasmine's whereabouts and was greeted with my parents' quizzical stares.

Jasmine is no more, as all the "imaginary friends" I have now are characters in stories that I have hibernating in unfinished word docs, but it's a little funny that what made Jasmine more "alive" was not me just believing in her existence, but that I kept her in the confides of home, and once she became realized outside of that, poof! she was gone. Gone because she wasn't just exclusive to me anymore. I had messed up giving her away. Reality had intruded the fantasy. In short, I grew up.

To create a person out of thin air, give them shape and identity and then be able to convince others of such a creation requires an intimacy that is challenging to explain. Of course psychoanalysts, child experts whathaveyou have tried to link the appearance of an imaginary friend to a child having a social "problem", and since only children are sheltered little monsters who bray at the moon at midnight every third Thursday, we are classified as having such a "problem." (I'm kidding) True, I created Jasmine's existence due to a desire to have siblings, but it also was an inkling of the storytelling life I would quasi-live one day, and the wild imagination that I continue to have all so I can keep a little fantasy in my reality.

Maybe that's why I was drawn to this odd little novella as The Love Child actually delves into that weird, sorta Frankenstein-equse way we 'create' individuals in our adolescent, and how they somehow translate towards our adulthood. The Love Child delves a little further as it asks the question: what would happen if you conjured up your imaginary friend as an adult? If you're Agatha Bodenham, you'd play along, that is, till such a creation begins to consume you greatly...