Mark Servas of The Elegant Variation recently posted an article on BookForum detailing some of his favorite literary losers—those unlucky protagonists too dopey and inept to even qualify as antiheroes. It features some expected choices, like Lucky Jim’s Jim Dixon, Nabokov’s Pnin, and Graham Greene’s Quiet American, but also some pleasant surprises such as Arthur Dent and Ticknor’s eponymous hero.
It's a fun little article, but it left out some of my favorite fuck-ups-- so here they are, in all their pied beauty.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John F. Kennedy Toole
Ignatius J. Reilly is an obese shut-in medievalist who lives with his mother, self-absorbed, misogynistic, and disgusting. Walker Percy described the character as a “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one,” which is a fair enough description, if a bit generous. Toole’s account of Reilly’s attempts to get his shit together and land a steady job is one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read, and one of the greatest descriptions of New Orleans ever put to paper. Oh, he also masturbates to memories of his dead dog. Well.
In the history of science, Johannes Kepler is one of the greats, a pioneer of modern astronomy and one of the greatest early proponents of a heliocentric system. In Banville’s novel though, he’s a neurotic, flakey, and hysterically peevish man, an ur-Woody Allan born, tragically, 400 years before the therapist and the orthopedic shoe. A funny, expansive, and ultimately sympathetic look at the foibles of genius, the novel is worth picking up for the scenes with the Rabellaisian Tycho Brahe alone.
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The unnamed protagonist of O’Brien’s metafictional masterpiece hits a little close to home for—an unemployed liberal arts student living off his relatives while trying, unsuccessfully, to write his masterpiece. At least I can proudly say that I hold my liquor better than O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical character, who spends a disquieting amount of the novel throwing up in various locales throughout Dublin.
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
In a Pynchon novel, you can safely assume that most if not all of the characters are off in some way, but none are more poignantly (and ickily) human in their depravity than Gravity's Rainbow's Dr. Pointsman. The stereotypical science dweeb, Pointsman makes women uncomfortable, men annoyed, and Pavlovian octopii homicidal. When he rhapsodizes about his masturbation fantasies, involving beautiful women and the Nobel Prize committee, it's difficult not to be grossed out-- and, to a certain extent, sympathetic. In a novel populated by larger than life characters, Pointsman is refreshingly banal, and although we don't want to see him prevail over the novel's heroes, we're at least a little relieved when he finally gets laid.
Although he’s better known for his more experimental fiction, Calvino’s short stories about a poor rural worker transplanted into an unnamed industrial city in Northern Italy are some of my favorites. Marcovaldo is something like a warmer, gentler precursor to Homer Simpson—an inept family man working a demeaning job, whose attempts to find a little happiness each day usually end up hospitalizing him in one way or another. Still, the twenty stories making up the story of Marcovaldo were written over the course of 15 years, and by the end Calvino tends to cut his protagonist a little slack. The very last story, “Santa’s Children,” is representative of the tone of the later pieces—charming, whistful, and a little bit haunting.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
Poor Prufrock has no luck with the ladies, and can hardly even work up the nerve to open his mouth. On top of all that, he’s balding. Sometimes when I read this poem, Eliot’s virtuoso language sort of obscures the fact that at the heart of it, Prufrock is a total dweeb.
Boris Vian’s hilarious, heartbreaking, incredibly strange novel (translated as Froth on the Daydream or Foam of the Daze or Chloe or Spray of the Days or…) has a lot of head-scratching bits in it, but few more peculiar than the main character’s best friend Chick, an amiable loser whose constant borrowing eventually drives the novel into tragedy. What’s he need all that money for? Simple—buying reams of books, discarded tissues, and hair clippings of the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, a bizarre parody of Sartre. Chick ultimately proves that when you live in a surrealist wonderland like Vian’s Paris, fiscal insolvency doesn’t pay—at the end of the novel his heart is plucked out by the police for not paying his taxes.
The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
When we first meet Oscar, he’s a fat, lonely kid whose only pleasures are comic books and fantasy novels—in a subversion of the usual bildungsroman expectations, he remains fat, lonely, and nerdy through most of the novel, despite the efforts of various characters. In the end, he’s dead. Brief & Wondrous indeed, I guess—but at least he got a Pulitzer out of it.
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