AUDIOCASSETTE REVIEW : Raucous Reading for Toole’s ‘Confederacy’

**** “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole. Read by Arte Johnson. Abridged by Mary Margaret Moffitt on two cassettes. Dove.

Success came too late for John Kennedy Toole, who died by his own hand before his mother badgered his manuscript into print, where it became a best seller. His portrait of a gross but vivid eccentric, Ignatius J. Reilly, his hard-tippling, hysterical mother and a supporting cast of New Orleans zanies gets a raucous, hilarious reading from comedian Arte Johnson.

Johnson does a running romp through a variety of voices from Ignatius’ stentorian imprecations to his mother’s sirenlike wailings about her wayward, 300-pound, 30-year-old boy. The book’s undertones of estrangement and despair, the feeling that it is a mad look at a maddening world, are better found in the text. But as a listening experience, the abridgement is an unmitigated delight.