Walker PercyRecensioni

Percy's breezy, glossy magazine format disguises an earnest introduction to a philosophy of the self in the late 20th Century U.S. culture, more accurately an eschatology especially concerned with the linguistic turn in late Continental theory and its relevance for middle class consumers. The initial 11 chapters (short, conversational, often presented in the list-centric or mini-survey trappings favoured by grocery checkout diversions and which Percy implicitly mocks) treat of various summaries of psychology and popular understanding of the Self. In fact, the book provides no traditional chapter structure, rather beginning with a cold open and careering to its termination.

Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education asseverates the "source material" for much of Lost in the Cosmos is found in the essays reprinted earlier in Message In A Bottle. While true, Cosmos gives that content different emphases, a slightly different spin. Perhaps he hoped to reach different readers, or make a second effort at reaching the same readers indirectly. Wikipedia pointed me to an online lecture based on the book, and this too is interesting, especially in arguing that Percy extends a tradition followed by C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength or The Screwtape Letters) and G.K. Chesterton (Everlasting Man), to "smuggle Christianity back into Christendom" as initially suggested by Kierkegaard. Neither replaces the book itself, unsurprisingly.

Both Kierkegaard and modern semiotics give us leave to speak of the self as being informed -- "possessed," if you like, at certain historical stages of belief and unbelief. It becomes possible, whether one believes in God or not, soul or not, to agree that in an age in which the self is not informed by cosmological myths, by totemism, by belief in God -- whether the God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam -- it must necessarily and by reason of its own semiotic nature be informed by something else. [178]

That something else is both unsettling and logically untenable. "It is possessed by the spirit of the erotic and the secret love of violence," all the more unsettling in this nuclear age, and logically untenable given that a Self (by definition a knowing subject rather than a known object) cannot know itself by reference to itself, that is to say, know itself as an object. Rather the Self must know itself transcendentally. Necessarily, then, Percy concludes the modern Self is lost. Percy notes the Self feasibly might again become found, but does not pursue that question here.

Like a heaping plate of comfort food for me. Also contains one of my favorite quotes in a novel: “Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals.” Hell yeah. But wait, there’s more.

Binx Bolling doesn’t seem to be having a bad time of it, a young man successfully managing an office of the family brokerage firm in 1959/1960 New Orleans, having a series of dalliances with his secretaries, and going to a lot of movies. Only unlike most of us, he has the knowledge that such things are merely an effort to keep the existential despair at bay at the forefront of his mind. He instinctually feels the quote from Kierkegaard that is the novel’s epigraph: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair”. Now he knows he is in despair and thus he is a bit better off by Kierkegaard’s reckoning, a step closer to the solution to it, but he is still a long way off a grounding of himself in religious faith. The forms and husk of religion are all around him of course, being plenty thick in the “Christ-haunted” but not “Christ-centered” South, as Flannery O’Connor memorably phrased it, but Kierkegaard too would have recognized the deadness of them. The best Binx can do is an awareness of “wonder” and a rejection of that which he feels too grossly ignores or obscures the wonder.

His state of despair and inadequate search for resolution to it are best recognized for what they are by his step-cousin Kate, who is often in the grip of a strong depression, who seems possibly bipolar. Like recognizes like, in a manner. She tells him, “You remind me of a prisoner in the death house who takes a wry pleasure in doing things like registering to vote. Come to think of it, all your gaiety and good spirits have the same death house quality. No thanks. I’ve had enough of your death house pranks”. She tells him, “It is possible, you know, that you are overlooking something, the most obvious thing of all. And you would not know it if you fell over it.” Not that she knows what it is either, rather she’s given up the possible search: “Don’t you worry. I’m not going to swallow all the pills at once. Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.”

Binx, like Kate and Kierkegaard, understands the commonplace human tendency to hide our despair from ourselves, what he calls “sinking into everydayness”, even if the three of them (in the novel’s current moment at least) exist in pretty different places after similarly escaping it. Kierkegaard thinks he knows the answer. Kate thinks there is no answer. Binx, as befits a more modern day literary fiction hero, embraces uncertainty. Watching an apparently materially successful African-American man exiting church on Ash Wednesday, the ending day of the novel, ashes marked on forehead, he thinks

I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.

My favorite Walker Percy novel. Been through it three times. It's deep, moving, funny, and short. Everything I need. I mostly loved the characters. Wanted to give both of them a big hug.

One of those rare books one can return to over and over. I highlighted a lot of paragraphs. Two great writers and thinkers share their friendship and knowledge. This is a beautiful book and must-read for lovers of literature.

The correspondents were friends from their teenage years in Greenville, Mississippi and began corresponding in the 1940s: Percy, an award-winning novelist, and Foote a historian of the US Civil War.

Couldn't get into it

Hypnotic story about malaise and meaning in an age of science and reason. New Orleans details made it especially compelling to me.

AB

This short book was actually a very long book about a loser misogynist 30 year old who does absolutely nothing and complains about it constantly. (Ok, so it's something between a coming of age novel and a mid-life crisis novel about a wealthy-class New Orleans man who is unhappy and wants more from life. He goes on various mild escapades with several women but there's no real plot whatsoever.)

That said, the writing is fantastic: very atmospheric and perfectly capturing New Orleans and also Chicago. The writer is also very observant and astutely describes several phenomenon that make the novel almost worth reading. Hart to believe this won the National Book Award, but maybe it just hasn't aged well?½

It’s hard to get terribly excited about a book where the main character, John Bickerson “Binx” Bolling, talks about malaise throughout the book. Binx is 29 and lives in a basement apartment in Gentilly, a suburb of New Orleans. His main activities are working as a stockbroker, going to the movies, and pursuing his secretaries for sex. The writing is strong, but the book follows a character who can only be briefly satisfied, then sinks back into a morass of malaise. He is constantly searching for meaning in life, but not finding much of anything. His great-aunt Emily tries to steer him in a positive direction, while her stepdaughter, Kate, contemplates suicide.

Here’s an example of Binx’s inner dialogue: “What is malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.”

What I liked:
- The writing is eloquent
- The sense of place is vivid – it is easy to picture New Orleans in 1954
- Emily’s speech near the end says what I have been thinking throughout the book

What I disliked:
- It is very difficult to feel much empathy for Binx due to his self-centeredness, racism, sexism, and lack of appreciation for his privileged life
- There is little to no plot – I typically enjoy character-driven novels, but I need at least a tiny bit of storyline to hold everything together
- There is no natural flow to the story – it feels like a disjointed series of memories and musings

This book won the National (US) Book Award for Fiction in 1962. If you like philosophical stories about existential angst, you may like it more than I did. It is well-written but rather dreary.

What a strange, unclassifiable, brilliant book. I can't think of a thing to compare it to. I need some time to sit with it before I declare it the best thing I've ever read, but it blew me away.

Loved the New Orleans setting...authentic. A little too high-brow for me....philosophical with some amusing parts

The Second Coming is a deeply spiritual book, though not a religious one, and I believe its writer, Walker Percy, wrote it to draw exactly that distinction. I think Percy would have said that faith is essential, in fact innate, in humanity, but that we have buried our impulse to truly know and understand it so deep that we mostly founder, like a lost ship, throughout our lives.

His main character, Will Barrett, has everything material a man could want. He has had a satisfying marriage, although he has recently lost his wife, and he has a daughter that he barely understands, and whose idea of a connection to God is an over-zealous religiosity. He is, in fact, a man involved in a soul search. He is looking for God, for some proof of God, for some meaning in a world of evil and indifference, and a definition of moral purpose. He seems to recognize in his fellow Christians that there are more of those who “join” because being a Christian furthers their contacts or gets them into the right golf game, than those who actually embrace the presence of a higher power. There are a lot of church-goers but really very few Christians in Will Barrett's world. In fact, if these people are Christians, they would inspire in us all the hope to never be one.

What Will does to determine whether he should believe or not is devise a sort of challenge to God himself.

“my death, if it occurs, shall occur not by my own hand but by the hand of God. Or rather the handlessness or inaction of God.”

Even in this, I think the reader is allowed to choose. Does Will receive his answer? Does God speak? You really have to read the book and decide for yourself. What we tend to forget, as human beings, is that faith is by definition believing without proof. If you can see it, touch it, know it, no faith is required. Thomas needed to see the wounds in Christ’s body to believe in His resurrection. Thomas may have been a believer, but he lacked faith.

There is much that is cynical and depressing in this story. One could make a very good case for the two main characters being off their rockers. Different is not always worse, sometimes it is just different, and that is how I see Allie and Will, both of whom seem to have better perception than their sane but greedy families and friends. What I also loved about the book is that, while in the beginning there seems to be nothing but desperation, in the end, there is hope.

This is an eminently quotable book. I marked dozens of passages, including one that is a direct reference to Matthew Arnold’s poem [b:Dover Beach|19413202|Dover Beach|Matthew Arnold|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386920640l/19413202._SX50_.jpg|53255806] (the second time in a week that that poem has been brought to my attention while reading another work. I do not believe in coincidence, so I have to call that serendipity.)

Percy is said to have a great deal in common with Flannery O’Conner, but it was Graham Greene who kept springing to my mind. Both Percy and Greene are Catholics struggling with their faith, and while they take different roads, I think they arrive at the same destination. I am now anxious to go back in time and read Percy’s earlier work about Will Barrett, [b:The Last Gentleman|84903|The Last Gentleman|Walker Percy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312014658l/84903._SY75_.jpg|2403417].

Binx Bolling is a man in search of meaning. His life doesn’t seem to have much meaning; he goes to movies and engages in sex with a string of vacuous young women who occupy the front office secretarial position in his office. He doesn’t seem to belong to anything or anyone, but then we find he has a family and that his life is not unentangled, it is possibly too deeply entangled. There is no shortage of persons to tell him who he is, or at least who he ought to be, only a shortage of people who actually know who he is or want to see him for himself. But then, there is his cousin (not really because his aunt is only her stepmother), Kate, and Kate, like him, is a searcher who cannot find her way.

I loved the way this story developed, particularly the psychological unveiling of the characters as the plot unfolds. Binx has reasons for his state of confusion, he has survived the trauma of the Korean War and he has failed to pick up his life and sink back into the oblivion of the everyday. Kate, likewise, has endured a traumatic event and been left running from the loss of her planned future and the pointlessness of the life that has been spared to her. Aunt Emily is their foil: she is sure she knows what life is about and that she has all the answers, and she seems unable to grasp why these kids don’t just follow instructions and join the dance in-step.

Percy has woven very believable characters into a very realistic world. It is a world of class distinction, pre-determined futures, and family expectations. And, his South seems very real as well. That he understands his subject is obvious. He captures the world of New Orleans and the pressures of a Southern identity.

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he stop off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.

Percy won the National Book Award for this, his first, novel, and I can see why. It has a lot going on beneath the surface. I imagine many of us have hoped to escape into the safety of a movie screen, where at least a happily-ever-after is a possibility. The problem: any such escape is temporary, when you exit the theater, you find life waiting to chew you up again. What Binx Bolling discovers is that there are no ordinary lives, there are just lives in which all the meaning we need, or get, might rest in the most ordinary of things and days, and the people who are able to see beyond our surface and glimpse into our soul.

Everything about this book was terrific. I remember reading the Sen. Bob Kerrey recommend this book in an interview and I found a copy a few weeks later. It just really hit a nerve and thought process with me as I was turning 30 years of age.

An engaging and thoughtful book about several topics relevant to our contemporary culture. Percy uses an unusual style like a Socratic provocateur challenging the reader to think about aspects of our culture, the nature of language, and the meaning of life. The book is one that, like those of Plato, Marcus Aurelius, or Wittgenstein, requires concentration, demands rereading, and ultimately encourages the reader to think seriously about the nature of the "Cosmos" and his own life.

The return of Dr. Tom More brings with it an unusual forensic mystery story intertwined with the mystery of belief. One would not expect less from the pen of Walker Percy. While a common criticism of Walker Percy's novels is that they are repetitive, this is probably because similar themes echo throughout his fiction -- no doubt a testimony to the novelist's fervent belief in the importance of highlighting key problems and issues of humanity, and to his belief that their continued presence in our lives demands scrutiny. We see this from the opening pages when the narrator announces that he notices something strange going on in Feliciana upon his return from two years in prison.

Percy, who himself had medical and pathology training, described this kind of philosophical book as a "diagnostic novel." Although the emphasis is clearly on the book's ideas and moral themes, The Thanatos Syndrome is also a medical thriller. As such, it was almost inevitable that the author would revisit a theme that he dealt with on numerous occasions in earlier novels: the relationship between the "abnormal" and the rest of the nominally healthy and sane society. The recovery of the "real" through pain, suffering, or illness underlies almost all of Percy's fiction. It is rooted in his conviction (with a nod to pioneer psychologist Carl Jung), that at least some of our neuroses, psychoses, anxieties, or depressions may be more than just symptoms; they may actually be resources for learning something about our inner "selves."

The relationship between the sane and the abnormal in the novel seems curiously reversed, almost like in Saul Bellow's Herzog. It has been noted that the author himself described his fictional design as combining Bellow's depth of character and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s, outrageousness and satire. In The Thanatos Syndrome words of apocalyptic warning are spoken by Father Rinaldo Smith, an aging, decrepit, and cranky priest who is given to seizures, catatonia, and bouts of odd behavior. While he is hardly a figure to command respect, Smith is a typical Percy creation whose purpose is to make us question who really deserves to be branded as "crazy."

The theme of alienation is also important in this work. Dr. Tom More's return from federal prison has him unsure if society has changed or if, instead, he has lost touch as a result of his years in prison. His alienation and status as an outsider allow him to ask questions that no one else cares to. Father Smith, declared mentally unsound by More, appears to have a firmer grasp on morality than does society, as represented by the duo of Comeaux and Van Dorn, both of whom represent the forces of evil.

Although the novel is in some ways structured as a thriller, the reader never gets the impression that More is in serious danger. The threats against him are subtle: implied loss of his favored parole status, arrests for trespassing, and a cable television van that appears to be following him. The subtlety of the threats underscores the idea that society as a whole can be attacked nonviolently, with damage done before anyone realizes the danger. I found this concluding novel of Percy both convincing due to its strong structure while not as emotionally powerful as either The Moviegoer or The Second Coming. I would, however, recommend it to readers interested in southern fiction or Walker Percy.½

What is wrong with Will Barrett? He is depressed and his golf game is off kilter. He has a sort of falling down sickness and that theme pervades this tale of revelation and change in the life of this widower who has become a somewhat different person than the young seeker whose story was told in The Last Gentleman.

In this, his fifth novel, Walker Percy once again surveys the themes of alienation, from self and from God, and dissatisfaction with the commercialism of modern American life. This book, while filled with realistic details about life in North Carolina in the 1980s, is able to speak to twenty-first century readers with its existential approach to life's problems. Many of the people Will encounters, and there are some memorable side characters like a chaplain whose belief is somewhat doubtful, remind me of the mediocre Christians who provided fodder for the commentaries of thinkers like Kierkegaard. We find Percy asking the important question whether people may be missing their own lives while going through the motions like shopping or wasting away on the local golf course.

At the center of the novel Will has an epiphany of sort that leads him to a fall that becomes a catalyst for a new life - a new relationship both for him and for a young woman named Allison who has her own psychological baggage. It was somewhat ironic, however, that Will's fall was due in part to his hubristic demand that he would commit suicide if God did not reveal himself. And even more ironic was that this demand led Will closer to being present for his own life than ever before.

Best of all is the way that Percy packages the story - in two parts that fit together so well that this may be his best novelistic effort. It certainly rivals the brilliance of his premiere effort of The Moviegoer. As a reader I was thankful that he returned to Will Barrett and found a way to tell a story of second chances and new love wrapped in an elegant package. The existence of god in the life of Will Barrett is brought home in a more thorough way here than in The Last Gentleman. I found it a transformation made possible by a reasonable belief.

Following the example of Camus' novel, The Fall, Walker Percy styled his fourth novel as a confessional with Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, as the titular confessor. Lancelot is packed with philosophical and theological questions, questions debated in his essay collection Message in the Bottle (1975). Lancelot, like Percy's previous protagonists, has lost himself to everydayness, sex, consumerism, newspapers, and television. He is jolted out of his alienation only by catastrophe: his wife has been unfaithful—his daughter is not his. Percy, a Christian novelist, uses violence, shock, and the bizarre as a catalyst to promote a self-directed search. Lancelot, like the characters in Percy’s earlier novels, undertakes the search only after catastrophe occurs.

Through a series of fragmented flashbacks, Lancelot, failed lawyer, ex-grid star, Rhodes scholar, and madman, travels through his memory in an attempt to discover what went wrong. He relives the past, while rambling in a monologue to a silent priest who acts as a sounding board.

The search begins, as in Percy’s earlier novels, by confronting the haunted past, because only by understanding the past can Lance contemplate the future. In doing so he must, as Percy has suggested in his philosophical essays, “stand in front of the house of his childhood in order to recover himself.” Once there Lance discovers his father was a crook. He must then not only become aware of sin, of evil, but he must also see it and experience it. What he sees is his wife committing adultery, his daughter participating in an orgy, and his son admitting his homosexuality. The issue is twofold: first Lancelot must see his wife’s unfaithfulness; then in his quest for sin, he must experience evil—he must kill. While searching for evil, he discovers that “sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.” Because his wife’s unfaithfulness jolts him out of his ordinary existence, he questions whether “good can come from evil,” and he undertakes a search “not for God but for evil.” “Dishonor,” Lancelot learns in this first-person narration, “is sweeter and more mysterious than honor. It holds a secret,” and he is determined to discover the secret.

So, the protagonist experiences evil and discovers despair. But for Percy, as with Kierkegaard, despair is a stage toward hope. Lancelot despairs of the modern world, “The great whoredom and fagdom of America.” But he visualizes a new life, a new order of things; “there will be a tight-lipped courtesy between men. And chivalry toward women. Women must be saved from the whoredom they have chosen.” His new life, as he visualizes it, involves a retreat to “a cabin and a barn and fifty acres in the Blue Ridge not far from Lexington, Virginia.” Joining him, he assumes, will be Anna, a victim of gang rape, who along with Lance is a patient in the institute. Lance links his future to Anna’s.

Percy, termed a stylist by many, has progressed in his style; the monologue device spans the novel. Yet he takes this novel one step further than Love in the Ruins, where the main character awaits the end of the world. Here Lancelot ends the modern world for himself and plans to start a new one. Again, as in his earlier novels, Percy reverses the traditional ways of making do in the modern world. Average happiness is conceived as despair, sin is better than indifference, forgetting better than remembering, wonder better than certainty, tragedy better than an ordinary day, and madness better than sanity.

The new novel, with Lancelot rambling to a priest in confessional fashion, breaks from Percy’s previous style. The monologue, which pretends to be a dialogue is broken at the novel’s conclusion when the priest answers “yes” to Lance’s newfound understanding and ability to change, to heal his broken self, as Percy has all his characters do at the conclusions of his novels. Percy, a Catholic, always incorporates religion into his novels, and Percival, the priest-psychiatrist, echoes Father Rinaldo Smith and Kev Kevin of Love in the Ruins.

The protagonists in Percy’s four novels all seek alternatives to their present alienated existence, alternatives which will enable them to function in a fragmented and empirically oriented society. Consequently, the fragmented self exemplified by Binx of The Moviegoer, Will of The Last Gentleman, Dr. More of Love in the Ruins, and Lance in this novel is reunified in varying degrees by the novels’ ends. Other similarities also exist between Lancelot and Percy’s previous novels. Binx is a moviegoer in that novel; Lancelot is a television watcher, while Margot is an actress with a company filming a movie in Belle Isle. Lancelot realizes, as Binx eventually did, “that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world, but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in illusions.” Percy also repeats his intrigue with catastrophe as a means of “rendering the broken self whole” in Lancelot. Binx in The Moviegoer, Sutter Vaught in The Last Gentleman, and Dr. More in Love in the Ruins realize that “only in times of illness or disaster or death are people real.”

Although Percy continues to pose philosophical questions in Lancelot—can good come out of evil, does tragedy heighten reality, how is one to live in the modern world—he has not progressed in developing new characters and ideas. They all echo and re-echo his last three novels as well as his philosophical essays. Lancelot continues a progression in Percy’s writing, for Lance, like the other protagonists, undertakes a search—in this case, a search for evil. He begins a new world for himself by personally and symbolically trying to destroy the modern world, by understanding evil through his participation in it.

The fragmented digressions of Lance’s mind are the vehicle Percy uses to convey his philosophy. I found myself getting bogged down in the author’s philosophical gymnastics over questions of the significance of the past, the question of good and evil, and the alienation and fragmentation of modern man. This made the novel seem a bit more tedious than its predecessors. This may be because he moved beyond his earlier approach to life as a journey and portrayed this narrative in confessional form. His use of this form seemed insufficient and led to a feeling that the protagonist, Lancelot Lamar was ranting at times.

A fabulous little book. The alienation of the main character is is very interesting, but in particular I felt that the solution to Kate's depression was what resonated with me the most. It was a feeling I had experienced in the past, while in a deep depression I just wished desperately that there was someone who would look out for me and tell me what to do. Tell me what I would do under normal circumstances and push me along to do it. It was an interesting thing to come across in this book. It is also one of the few books that has made me laugh out loud.

With an opening paragraph that explodes on the page with references to Christendom, Western civilization, and Dante, I immediately knew that this book was going to be good if not great. However I was thrown off a bit by the structure in which the first part was set on July Fourth and then went back to July 1st in the second part, but I got my bearings and began to enjoy the satire and the chaos of the world of the mid-80s in the United States where everything was falling apart around Paradise Estates, "an oasis of concord in a troubled land."

The protagonist is Dr. Thomas More (yes, namesake of the famous St. Thomas More) a heavy-drinking psychiatrist who has had his share of personal tragedy. He comments, "It is my misfortune---and blessing---that I suffer from both liberal and conservative complaints, e.g., both morning terror and large-bowel disorders, excessive abstraction and unseasonable rages, alternating impotence and satyriasis. So that at one and the same time I have great sympathy for my patients and lead a fairly miserable life."(p 20)

Tom hopes to turn his fortunes around with his invention, the lapsometer, with which he "can measure the index of life, life in death and death in life" --- This being a very scientific way to measure a sort of relative spirituality. The plot centers around his attempts to make progress with his invention while maintaining a semblance of normality, a vigorous love life, and interactions with a variety of interesting characters that include a Jewish atheist and a mephistopheles-like character who manages to persuade Tom to sign away his invention (i.e. his soul).

Through it all he maintains his own Catholic faith, while at the same time claiming, somewhat reasonably, to be a "bad" Catholic. At the same time he serves his fellow man in his role as a doctor while dealing with attacks from "Bantu" warriors and the impending collapse of society. The delight of the book comes from the savage satire and the potential for change in the life of Dr. Tom.

Seldom have I read a book that brings to mind my personal history; Love in the Ruins is one of those books. Written in the early 1970s, but set in a not too distant future of the mid 80s it is filled with references that in lesser books would merely seem out of date and discourage the reader. Yet Percy has captured the time and place with specific cultural entities like Howard Johnson's and others. I found this intriguing and fitting in a way that made the deterioration of society in the story more believable. He succeeds (certainly not intentionally) in mirroring the ongoing chaos in our own contemporary world. Ultimately, this is a novel, as the title suggests, about ruin, but also love, and perhaps therein a glimmer of hope---read it and find out.½

I have wanted to read this book for a long time and I'm glad I finally got around to it. The language is wonderful, the descriptions bring you right into New Orleans, and I found the protagonist to be an interestingly flawed character. I ended up giving the book 4 stars instead of 5 not for any real flaw in the execution but because I need just a bit more plot for the books I enjoy the most. While I was intrigued by the journey and things do happen and change over the course of the book, that isn't the real point of the book. Well worth the reading time, a strong 4 star book.

Having recently reread Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, I was looking forward to his second foray into the world of the novel. In many ways I was not disappointed. We meet on the first page, an immature Will Barrett, who has spent five years in psychoanalysis; he is a native southerner serving as a “humidification engineer” at Macy’s department store in New York City. An introspective educated man, vaguely aware of his own despair, Barrett is “dislocated in the universe.” Percy’s opening description of Barrett introduces his character: “He had to know everything before he could do anything. . . For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of a man he was or what he must do,".

His paralysis toward commitment to abstract knowledge before making decisions leads Barrett to world pervaded by ordinariness. He despairs of clear answers to his nagging questions about the purpose of life—both for himself and others—but he has some dim hopes that his quest will eventually bear fruit.

One day, as he contemplates his station in life while at Central Park, he opts to become, as Binx Bolling had in The Moviegoer, an observer and not merely the observed. He spots a beautiful young woman, Kitty Vaught, through his newly purchased telescope and sets out to meet her. Smitten, Barrett traces her to a New York hospital, where he discovers that she and the Vaught family are comforting her younger brother, Jamie, who is dying. In a somewhat improbable sequence of events, Will Barrett’s southern charm and gentlemanly pose win over each of the Vaught family members, and he is invited to accompany them back home to Atlanta, mostly as companion and confidant to Jamie as he lives out his remaining days. Barrett agrees, interested as he is in staying as close to Kitty Vaught as possible.

During his stay, Kitty’s sister, Valentine, who has joined a Catholic order of nuns that takes care of indigent children, enters Barrett’s life and coerces him to seek Jamie’s conversion, believing that he alone can ensure that Jamie enters eternity as a “saved” person. Soon thereafter, Sutter Vaught, Jamie’s brother, arrives on the scene. Barrett finds in him a curious but appealing sense of daring and courage. He seems to be someone who has lived life and not merely hypothesized about it.

Sutter and Jamie disappear, and it becomes Barrett’s duty to track them down and return Jamie home—a task made all the more alarming and tenuous when Barrett discovers in Sutter’s New Mexico apartment, along with some helpful maps, a stenographic notebook recording Sutter’s jaded outlook on life and community. Barrett familiarizes himself with the notebook during his subsequent trek, as Percy interweaves excerpts from Sutter’s painful explorations with Barrett’s unfolding search for the two brothers. Percy pushes the reader to diagnose the debilitating malady from which both Sutter and Barrett suffer: an utter sense of homelessness in the world that seems to make errant materialism or suicide the only options for the thoughtful individual.

Sutter’s notebook contains some key observations. If man is a wayfarer, he never stops anywhere long enough to hear that there is hope that conquers despair, salvation that conquers death. Will’s amnesia is not a symptom but the human condition: Man struggles to make the world anew at every moment; because he is ill-fitted for this Godlike task, it is not ennobling but pitiable. Sutter’s solution involves extremes of emotion and choice, as if they could somehow exalt a man to the stature necessary to reconstruct the world. Will, however, becomes a preserver of continuity growing from telescopic observer and wayfarer in a Trav-L-Aire named Ulysses, to comforter of a dying friend and agent of salvation for a living one.

Walker Percy takes ample opportunity to observe the passing scene. He wryly comments that though the North has never lost a war, Northerners have become solitary and withdrawn, as if ravaged by war. In sharp contrast, the South is invincibly happy. Will feels most homeless when he is among those who appear to be completely at home: “The happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.” Percy presents no simple solution to the plague of homelessness. If Will is to reenter the South and marry Kitty, he wants Sutter with him. Perhaps Will is still a wayfarer, yet in The Last Gentleman he has stayed around just long enough to hear something of the honest truth.½

Who is sane and who is crazy in this novel of Southern Gothic horrors of alcohol, sex, lust, jealousy, a hurricane and madness. And who better to tell this story than a true son of the South like Walker Percy, who spins a page-turning story with a twist at the end.

Until my recent reading of The Moviegoer, I was a virgin to the Walker Percy experience. I came to this book because of years of glorious reviews and comments, his reputation of being a writer with a serious philosophical bent, and his 1962 National Book Award. I knew of Percy’s Southern origins, his agnostic upbringing, and about having lost his father to suicide when Walker was barely a teenager. Later I learned that just two years later, he was orphaned by his mother’s fatal car accident, one that Walker always believed was a suicide as well. Percy was a literary groundbreaker, a major influence on his fellow Southern writers with his estranged characters that were detached from much in their lives. With his early life, that disconnect isn’t hard to source.

Now that I’ve read the book, I recognize the talent, found the characters interesting, was fascinated by their motivations that circled and sometimes slammed into each other, or simply headed away in different directions. All that said, I found myself detached from much of the book—possibly, it was the right book, just at the wrong time. Because of my age and life situation, I’m hip to the fact that books such as this won’t be able to wait on a shelf in my den, waiting for just the right time to read again—I’ve lost that life possibility. I would put on my “So Many Books, Too Little Time” T-shirt, if I only had one. [My trivia for this exact moment, that quote is surprisingly attributed to Frank Zappa.]

Anyway, a widely acclaimed literary classic it is, but I’m moving on to my next book.½

This book probably felt deep and insightful in its day, but it did not connect with me. I know Walker Percy is hailed as one of the great Catholic writers, but I feel like the questions he addresses were better handled by Flannery O'Connor. Also, the ennui of successful white men leaves me cold in the year of Our Lord 2020. I'm not sorry to have read this, but I did not find it timeless.