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Christopher Owens  🔖Although it may not appear to be the case at the time, tragedies can lead to beautiful moments.


On the 26th March 1969, a 31 year old John Kennedy Toole (who had been missing for two months) decided to end his life by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car. Cutting short a promising academic career, he let behind two manuscripts that he had worked on and had made attempts to have them published.

The latter manuscript, A Confederacy of Dunces, had been rejected for publication in 1966. When it finally appeared on bookshelves in 1980, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is generally regarded as one of the definitive American novels of the 20th century.

Inter-family rivalry and threatened court cases delayed the publication of the second manuscript, The Neon Bible, which finally appeared in 1989.

Toole himself wasn’t enamoured with The Neon Bible. When corresponding with the noted editor Robert Goteibb (responsible for bringing Catch 22 to publication), Toole wrote that:

In 1954, when I was 16, I wrote a book called The Neon Bible, a grim, adolescent, sociological attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South—and the fundamentalist mentality is one of the roots of what was happening in Alabama, etc. The book, of course, was bad, but I sent it off a couple of times anyway.

An unfair view of the book because there is a lot to admire about the book. Like Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, it is about the changing face of America and how such changes are viewed by those at the bottom of the social ladder.

Beginning with our narrator, David, on a train, he begins to ruminate on his life in a small Southern town. Remembering how the locals treated him, his Aunt Mae (whose attempts at stardom have seen her branded a harlot), his father (who is killed in World War II) and his long-suffering mother, David does not have fond memories of his town:

But I knew the way the people in the 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 out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north . . . 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 his life, and that was what everybody thought.

While not as memorable as A Confederacy of Dunces, it’s still an enjoyable and thoughtful read. It's a simple narrative which (as Toole admitted) is adolescent in its simplicity and its conclusions (particularly the ending which comes out of nowhere).

However, that is also part of its strength as it is unfiltered in its depiction of a conservative hellhole which preaches forgiveness and kindness but practices the opposite. It also makes David a relatively simple character: not a John Boy style doofus, nor a deep intellectual. Merely a teenager who has grown up with limited family and no friends trying to navigate the world, and that makes it all the more moving.

Though Toole’s genius was recognised long after his suicide, we are all the better for his works.

John Kennedy Toole, 1989, The Neon Bible. Grove Press. ISBN-13: 978-0802128867

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.

The Neon Bible

Christopher Owens  🔖Although it may not appear to be the case at the time, tragedies can lead to beautiful moments.


On the 26th March 1969, a 31 year old John Kennedy Toole (who had been missing for two months) decided to end his life by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car. Cutting short a promising academic career, he let behind two manuscripts that he had worked on and had made attempts to have them published.

The latter manuscript, A Confederacy of Dunces, had been rejected for publication in 1966. When it finally appeared on bookshelves in 1980, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is generally regarded as one of the definitive American novels of the 20th century.

Inter-family rivalry and threatened court cases delayed the publication of the second manuscript, The Neon Bible, which finally appeared in 1989.

Toole himself wasn’t enamoured with The Neon Bible. When corresponding with the noted editor Robert Goteibb (responsible for bringing Catch 22 to publication), Toole wrote that:

In 1954, when I was 16, I wrote a book called The Neon Bible, a grim, adolescent, sociological attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South—and the fundamentalist mentality is one of the roots of what was happening in Alabama, etc. The book, of course, was bad, but I sent it off a couple of times anyway.

An unfair view of the book because there is a lot to admire about the book. Like Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, it is about the changing face of America and how such changes are viewed by those at the bottom of the social ladder.

Beginning with our narrator, David, on a train, he begins to ruminate on his life in a small Southern town. Remembering how the locals treated him, his Aunt Mae (whose attempts at stardom have seen her branded a harlot), his father (who is killed in World War II) and his long-suffering mother, David does not have fond memories of his town:

But I knew the way the people in the 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 out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north . . . 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 his life, and that was what everybody thought.

While not as memorable as A Confederacy of Dunces, it’s still an enjoyable and thoughtful read. It's a simple narrative which (as Toole admitted) is adolescent in its simplicity and its conclusions (particularly the ending which comes out of nowhere).

However, that is also part of its strength as it is unfiltered in its depiction of a conservative hellhole which preaches forgiveness and kindness but practices the opposite. It also makes David a relatively simple character: not a John Boy style doofus, nor a deep intellectual. Merely a teenager who has grown up with limited family and no friends trying to navigate the world, and that makes it all the more moving.

Though Toole’s genius was recognised long after his suicide, we are all the better for his works.

John Kennedy Toole, 1989, The Neon Bible. Grove Press. ISBN-13: 978-0802128867

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.
Book Reviews Christopher Owens

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