The book for the next meeting of our neighborhood book club is A Conspiracy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole. The last time I read the book was probably forty years ago. I found that I remembered it tolerably well--only one character, Professor Talc, seemed wholly new, and he is a minor character. But pretty much everyone else seemed familiar, if not by name then by role.
It struck me in the reading that I have very little sense of Ignatius O'Reilly's voice. Does he sound like Foghorn Leghorn? Does he sound like someone with a heavy New York accent of the type less frequently heard now? Should I be hearing a bass or a baritone, considering his size? This did not disturb me the first time I read the book. Yet given the rich absurdity of nearly everything Ignatius says or writes, it would be better to be able to imagine the voice. Most of the rest of the cast speaks an English that is just enough off to guide one: "Idnatius" for "Ignatius", "ersters" for "oysters", "nucular bum" for "nuclear bomb". But Ignatius has been to school, and acquired diction, if not sense.
And there seemed to a lot of screaming: desk sergeants at patrolmen, bar owners at their staff, the residents of Constantine Street at neighbors and family. Is the screaming what a Midwesterner would call "yelling"? I think of screaming as more nearly unhinged than yelling.
The book aged pretty well, I thought. There are usually reservations when one rereads, and this was not an exception. It seemed to me that Burma Jones's dialogue would have improved by losing about every other "Whoa!". Mrs. Levy served a purpose in the plot, but otherwise cluttered the page without gaining plausibility or adding much. And as I said, I couldn't hear Ignatius's voice.
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