Ken and Thelma: The Story of a Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole's mother, Thelma, was a domineering presence in the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's life, keeping him from socializing as a child and neglecting, after his suicide, to tell any of his close friends about his funeral. Yet Thelma's influence ultimately defined ""Ken"" Toole's legacy as she tirelessly pushed for Confederacy's publication, pressing the otherwise-forgotten manuscript upon Walker Percy at the LSU press. Fletcher, a friend of both Ken and Thelma, sets the record straight on the chronology of Confederacy's writing and Thelma's role-correcting the ""greatly simplified and distorted version"" of the accepted story. But he also reveals just how much Thelma enjoyed the ""spotlight she had craved from childhood."" Exploring the Louisiana lifestyle, Fletcher also offers perhaps the most bizarre Bayou crazy quilt of names gathered this side of the Mississippi, including, among others, Welton P. Mouton, Jr., Doonie Guibet, and a Mr. and Mrs. Crump. Wisely included here are a series of letters written by Ken to the author and the extraordinary letters between Ken and Robert Gottlieb, the Simon & Schuster editor who would eventually reject Confederacy. But these valuable resources are revealed fully only towards the book's end, an unfortunate choice that interrupts the story abruptly just when things start to get interesting. What this memoir lacks is both a feeling for the richness of the characters involved in the Toole's lives and, most disappointingly, a thorough sense of Ken Toole and the worldview that motivated him to write his comic classic. With Fletcher choosing to focus more on his own relationship with Thelma in the period after her son's death, perhaps a more appropriate title for this volume would have been Thelma and Joel and Ken. 16 pages of b&w photos.