and Dr. Bob Comeaux, he pits himself against area police and influential citizens in solving a local mystery.

With the help of his cousin, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, More uncovers an illegal experiment to quiet prisoners, avert homosexuality, lessen violence, and decrease teen pregnancy through putting heavy sodium deposits in the local water. He also finds children at Belle Ame school, which his own children attend, drugged into submission by Dr. John Van Dorn and staff. His wife, Ellen, is transformed into an infallible bridge player but a distant wife and mother, and a number of local residents exhibit strange, animal-like behaviors, all the result of drinking “treated” water. More’s old friend Father Smith seems insane and has confined himself in a remote fire tower. He warns More of the misuses of science in Nazi Germany and the evil of ordinary people in the modern world.

Although More successfully ends the drugged water experiment in his own parish, he finds his work has little effect on American society at large. Van Dorn sensationalizes his experiences in a best-selling book, becoming a talk show celebrity. Meanwhile, More continues his small, but poor, psychiatric practice, resumes simple family life, helps a few patients, and clings to Christian beliefs. He cannot cure, but only befriend, Father Smith, who chooses to remain secluded from a world he finds insane, a world deprived of hope (where religious faith appears mad), a world in which only watching for brushfires and crying out apocalyptic warnings seem purposeful.

The first sentence of The Thanatos Syndrome places the reader in familiar Walker Percy territory: “For some time now I have noticed that something strange is occurring in our region.” Percy’s last novel, The Second Coming (1980), begins: “The first sign that something had gone wrong manifested itself while he was playing golf.” Recognitions continue as the reader discovers that the man sensing strange things happening in The Thanatos Syndrome is the same man who narrated an earlier novel, Love in the Ruins (1971). He is Thomas More, diagnostician of malaise, who in Love in the Ruins wielded his invention, the “quantitative-qualitative ontological lapsometer,” to measure a person’s level of estrangement from the self. Returning us to this familiar character, the antenna-twitching More, Percy also places us in his own backyard, Feliciana, with a devoted particularity. It is a location Percy readers know well enough now to think of as a second home.

In the near future of this sequel, which opens in 1996, More, still a psychiatrist, has been absent from Feliciana for two years, serving a sentence in a white-collar penitentiary for selling uppers and downers to truck drivers. Resuming his practice after the prison term, More is perplexed by patients who lack the symptoms—depression, phobias, longings—he is accustomed to seeing. Such adjustment would not be a bad thing, More reasons, if those he observed still manifested psychic complexity in their speech and mannerisms. The new adjusted subject, however, is dull, with flat-toned feelings and a tendency to talk in two-word sentences, like a computer. (This linguistic detail is one at which first-time Percy readers might balk, but aficionados of Percy’s satirical imagination will relish it.) A typical symptom of the newly adjusted is that when asked “Where is Schenectady?” he will supply a comically exact answer, so many miles north and west of other cities, without wondering why the questioner would pose such a query. In prison, More concluded that the essence of human behavior is contention and distrust. Two people sharing a room will naturally find a “side” to take and argue vehemently, and when not arguing, each will be sensitive to detect slights from the other person. Thus the blank passivity of Feliciana folks is troubling.

More turns detective and, with the help of his cousin, Dr. Lucy Libscomb, discovers that Feliciana drinking water has been laced with sodium 20, an ion used to cool the core of nuclear reactors, which alters the brain’s pharmacology, reducing anxiety and stimulating endorphins. Research psychiatrists at the Qualitarian Center, who among other things specialize in euthanasia for all ages, are doping the water to stop the decay in the social fabric. More corners Dr. Comeaux, a Qualitarian, who explains with statistics how the water tampering has lowered crime, depression, and teenage pregnancy rates. He asks More to join the Qualitarian team, to join the conspiracy against wife-beating, homosexuality, and ghetto murder. More objects that human rights are being violated—contemporary decadence is not sufficient justification for controlling the choices people make. More cites instances of sodium imbibers turning maverick under the influence, going sexually animalistic and murderous. Also, the nonimbibing scientist at the controls can, as does John Van Dorn, indulge megalomania, feeding massive doses to schoolchildren to facilitate molesting them sexually under the guise of ridding humanity of its puritanical conditioning. By the novel’s end, More has disrupted the Qualitarians, shut down the water tampering, and welcomed the signs of phobias and anxiety returning in his patients.

Thomas More models the quirky personhood he seeks to preserve. With his lapses into silence, quasi-seizures, and déjà vus, and his fondness for tossing paper airplanes while waiting for patients and tossing back Jack Daniels when the need arises, he still manages to observe and anatomize the lives of other selves with the sincerity and curiosity of a botanist set loose on a newly discovered continent. Percy favors a narrator down-at-the-heels, beleaguered, intermittently dazed, not untouched by the craziness Percy sees ruling the twentieth century, a time which has generated so many imponderables that a novelist can make a living recording them verbatim. Stedmann’s History of World War I is recreational reading for More, just as it was for the Thomas More of Love in the Ruins. This history documents such mechanical massacres as the battle of Verdun, where in a year’s time a half-million men killed one another without passion, and the battle line remained unchanged. The early More read Stedmann as “usual late-night fare,” while the late More resorts to the text when on vacation with his wife Ellen and their children at Disneyworld. Stedmann is More’s anchor amid the phantasmagoria of Tomorrowland: “Tomorrowland!—We don’t even know what Todayland is!—fond, talkative, informative, and stunned, knocked in the head, like dreamwalkers in a moonscape.” Todayland is the context of detached murder, whether of Germans by Americans and vice versa, or of the useless by Qualitarians. Todayland is the age of science, and More, like other Percy personas, is a man of science who manages to see the maniac hiding in its edifice of “reason.”

More’s view as a psychiatrist is a happy contrast to the liberated-from-Freud, empirical viewpoint which takes its lead from science and declares psychiatry’s business to be understanding neurological pathways and drugging them where necessary. More, on the contrary, listens to the voices of his patients, finding meaning in their dreams and fears. He claims Harry Stack Sullivan as his continuing inspiration, a psychiatrist who feared the tyranny of theory and advised his students never to label someone a loser, as it was his experience that even a psychotic has a unique self and has it in his power, with a little help from the right doctor, to reach it. More’s response to Sullivan’s advice: “I believed him. Amazing! I’m amazed every time it happens.”

The tension between empirical psychiatry and More’s personal approach is the novel’s thematic core. The syndrome Percy calls “Thanatos” is that metaphysical suspension which has energized more killing of men by men in this century than in all previous centuries combined. The empirical psychiatrists at the Qualitarian center so concerned with curing social sicknesses are agents of the syndrome. Their way of improving life is to kill life. Percy does not villainize the operants at the Qualitarian center, but gently parodies the types of unique human beings who arrive at the conclusion that other unique human beings should become cybernetic zombies.

Dr. More’s thinking about the death syndrome is validated by conversations with Father Rinaldo Smith, a priest whose hospice serves the dying as an alternative to euthanasia. Smith is another of Percy’s semi-cripples, which signifies that if truth exists, he has it. Peripheral to the story’s action, he speaks in monologue-conversation with More, a seizure-induced “confession,” and a sermon to which Qualitarians are listening. Smith’s outright Catholic ideology gives Percy a timeless or saintly angle of vision through which to assess “Thanatos.” His first proclamation to More is that meaning has evaporated from language. Meaning goes, and with it the existence of the soul. Percy, tongue-in-cheek, has More unable to make heads or tails of what Smith is saying. Percy keeps More tolerantly skeptical, sensing more wackiness afoot while being forgiven by Smith, who explains that faith has been taken from men—it is not something they intentionally lose. Through Smith’s confession, Percy puts what is happening at the Qualitarian center in historical perspective. In Germany, before and during World War II, Smith witnessed “Thanatos” lashing its tail in the nonmalevolent, brilliant psychiatrists and physicians who “experimented” with children, killing them in the process. The cool objectivity and reasonableness of their work he could almost understand, such was the power of the scientific atmosphere to erase human sympathy. Asked by More why he chose the priesthood, Smith answers that one must finally choose between life and death. Reopening his hospice, Smith pleads with the Qualitarians: “If you have a patient, young or old, suffering, dying, afflicted, useless, born or unborn, whom you for the best of reasons wish to put out of his misery. . . . Please send him to us.”

Father Smith’s words work as a chorus in the novel. Using the mad priest, Percy can bring up such matters as sin and the devil. Smith credits the ears of a group of children to whom Mary appeared and explained that the misery of the twentieth century is the result of a pact made between God and the devil. Granted one hundred years of rule, the Great Depriver’s strategy was to leave man to himself. Result: “Reason defeated faith, Science killed one hundred million.” More guesses Smith’s strange ideas are indicative of “presenile dementia.” The author understandably, wants it both ways—today’s antiscientific prophet will be judged demented in a faithless age. Whatever More’s ambivalence, he sides with Smith. Life, however deranged or broken, is to be treasured, cared for. Percy brings up Kurt Vonnegut’s line—that man’s biggest problem is his overdeveloped brain—to disagree with it, satirizing it in scenes between More and his patient whose brain is “fixed” by sodium ions. The troubled woman who before drinking sodium wrote poems and wandered the beach now greets More with “You getting much, Doc?” One of Percy’s perennial targets is a behaviorism which insists that the gap between animals and humans can be closed.

Few writers compare with Percy when it comes to seeing and showing people. Thomas More’s specialty is registering the complex physical presence of people: “I take a good look at her. . . . There’s this odd dash of gamin French about her face, bruised cheek, and almost black boy’s hair.” In a novel about the century of death Percy makes More the Gerard Manley Hopkins of pied humanity, a restorer of the sense of wonder in people, particularly individuals. On the book’s third page, More observes of a patient: “She had a certain mannerism, as do we all, which was as uniquely hers as her fingerprints.” The mannerism occurs as part of a certain verbal exchange she and More frequently have. It is part of her response when talking, and it is unaffectedly her. More knows her; not blinded by the familiarity, he names the familiarity and thus knows her better than does her husband. Percy’s success as a novelist has always been based on his ability to rescue the familiar by naming it. His narrator is usually distant in some way from things, as in the case of More who has not been in Feliciana for two years and therefore sees things sharply.

As a therapist, More is concerned that a patient throw no part of his unique self away: “I contrived that it crossed her mind that her terror might not be altogether bad.” Anxiety, phobias, failure are not a scourge to be drugged away. They offer information from the soul. Percy’s idea of “the human self” proposes neither the actualized, liberated, successful self nor the worthless self, as Vonnegut says, a creature with a brain too large for its own good. More puts patients at ease with the fact that life is a succession of failures. Suicide is the same as euthanasia—it refuses to live with this fact. More proposes that the self listen to itself.

The Thanatos Syndrome is, among many other things—entertainment, criticism of utopian impulses, social observation—the confirmation of a vocation. More notes that our age is the time of people not knowing what to do. They come to psychiatrists hoping to ease this problem, among others. The message More heard from Harry Stack Sullivan was that people can wake to their destiny with a little help from the therapist. The formulation of this revelation Percy shaped earlier in his essay “The Message in the Bottle”:And what if the news the newsbearer bears is the very news the castaway had been waiting for, news of where he came from and who he is and what he must do, and what if the newsbearer brought with him the means by which the castaway may do what he must do? Well then, the castaway will, by the grace of God, believe him.

What stands out most about The Thanatos Syndrome is Percy's masterful ability to incorporate numerous significant themes into an engaging, readable narrative. The first-person perspective, combined with Tom More's relatable character, captivates readers. Percy often pauses the main storyline to include elements such as case studies, a confessional monologue, a series of impressionistic, fragmented paragraphs during More and Lucy's intimate moments, and a climactic, rhythmic sermon reminiscent of a flowing free-verse chant. The novel is set in the near future and shifts between past and present, much like Percy's previous work, Love in the Ruins.

The book's positive, uplifting conclusion complements the rest of the story, following the structure of classical comedy despite its dark and unsettling themes, hinted at by the title, The Thanatos Syndrome (derived from the Greek word for death, thantos). Although the novel tackles some terrifying subjects, it concludes peacefully, without any loss of life. Retribution is delivered in a restorative and cohesive manner. More and his wife find happiness together again. Lucy's husband returns. The wrongdoers accept their consequences, serving their penance through hospice work. The Blue Boy project is dismantled, and its leader, Comeaux, is gently persuaded to transform Father Smith's struggling hospice into a sanctuary for patients previously marked for euthanasia or pedeuthanasia. In a comic twist, Van Dorn, another key player in the sodium conspiracy, is reduced to a primate state after More pressures him to consume a large amount of sodium coolant. Confined with a female gorilla named Eve, this unexpected human Adam plays with her until he reverts to his original state, eventually becoming famous as the author of My Life and Love with Eve.

On another level, The Thanatos Syndrome is a skillfully crafted suspense novel, blending elements of a detective story with an action thriller. This was intentional, as Percy modeled the book after The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a classic sci-fi film where the protagonist investigates peculiar changes in the local people. Early in the novel, as in the film, the main character is suspected of delusion and paranoia for "imagining a conspiracy, a stealing of people's lives, an invasion of body snatchers."

Why did Percy choose to frame a fundamentally serious book as a fast-paced, popular thriller? His reasoning was both practical and realistic. "There is nothing wrong with the adjectives 'philosophical' and 'religious,' but when you apply them to a novel, it is enough to make the novelist turn pale," Percy explained.

Walker Percy embarked on his literary journey at the age of forty-five in 1961. His debut novel, a concise story set in New Orleans, was titled The Moviegoer. The novel received enthusiastic acclaim from both critics and readers, winning the National Book Award and achieving bestseller status. Additionally, The Moviegoer has maintained its popularity, remaining in continuous print. Over the next twenty-six years, Percy authored a total of twenty-six books; his final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, was released shortly before his death and served as a fitting conclusion to his remarkable career. Within two weeks of its publication, the novel climbed into the Top Ten on several national bestseller lists, became a dual main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and sold out its initial seventy-five thousand copies. In a 1984 interview, Percy described his first novel, The Moviegoer, as "probably a good novel to teach ... because academics, after all, are interested in ideas, and this is a novel of ideas as well as, I hope, a good novel in its own right." This same description could easily apply to The Thanatos Syndrome as well.

Set in the near future, this novel follows psychiatrist Tom More as he uncovers a dark and dangerous plot. The conspiracy involves redirecting heavy sodium coolant from a nuclear reactor for a covert experiment on an unsuspecting public, an organized network of sexual abusers and pedophiles, and mind control. Tom More shares his name with Sir Thomas More, a writer, philosopher, scholar, diplomat, and statesman, who was executed in 1535 by King Henry VIII for refusing to abandon his Roman Catholic faith. Sir Thomas More is also known for his speculative political essay, Utopia. Written in Latin, the essay narrates the journey of a traveler searching for the ideal form of government. The term "utopia," coined by More, has become widely used to describe books proposing a vision for the future, such as Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (1627) and Jonathan Swift's classic Gulliver's Travels (1726). Sir Thomas More's unwavering dedication to his principles, which ultimately led to his execution, earned him a reputation as a man of integrity and insight—"a man for all seasons," as he was portrayed in the 1966 Oscar-winning film of the same name. Fittingly, a reviewer from Newsday praised Walker Percy, the author of The Thanatos Syndrome and creator of the fictional Tom More, as "a writer for all seasons."

Similar to Percy's previous novels, The Thanatos Syndrome is an engaging read that overflows with ideas. In under four hundred pages, the author skillfully uses a variety of literary styles, themes, and genres. This novel can be appreciated on multiple levels. It serves as a clever medical crime thriller, a subtly humorous novel of Southern manners, and a thought-provoking philosophical work.

Percy critiques many societal aspects; as he mentioned to interviewer Ashley Brown, "A good deal of my energy as a novelist comes from malice, the desire to attack things in our culture, both North and South." Yet, beneath Percy's spirited critiques lies a consistent theme—his concern over the unsettling similarities between the cultural and medical practices of 1920s Weimar Germany and contemporary America. In the setting of The Thanatos Syndrome, which is set in a familiar yet slightly altered future, the author conveys his anxieties by imagining a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that sets a morally dangerous precedent. The fictional Doe v Dade case connects the concept of "personhood" in children to their language development, setting it at around eighteen months, and permits the termination of younger children's lives if they are deemed unfit due to genetic, medical, or intellectual reasons. Through the notion of "pedeuthanasia," Percy references the 1973 real-life Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade, where the court found that state laws prohibiting abortion in the first six months of pregnancy were unconstitutional as they infringed on the "right to privacy" under the Fourteenth Amendment. As a devout Catholic writer (who converted after a near-fatal struggle with tuberculosis), Percy draws a parallel between the fictional concept of pedeuthanasia and the real issue of abortion, which is strongly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church.

Regardless of one's stance on Percy's view in the abortion debate, the significance of the issues he raises in The Thanatos Syndrome cannot be overlooked. However, Percy's concerns extend even further. His comparison of fictional pedeuthanasia to real-life abortion does not imply a distrust of science. "I don't have any quarrel with science," Percy told an interviewer shortly before his passing in May 1990. In an earlier Tom More novel, Love in the Ruins, written in 1971, the protagonist advocates for believing in science, its principles, its rationality, and its potential to contribute positively to society.

Walker Percy was deeply troubled by politicians, soldiers, scientists, and other leaders, regardless of their political affiliations, who enforce policies promising national "salvation." These individuals exploit the public's laziness or indifference to pursue their own agendas, later seeking scapegoats when things inevitably fail. Percy was particularly concerned about civil rights and the availability of information, especially regarding scientific experiments that could impact the general public. His concerns have been validated by the strange events of the past fifty years, which have included everything from hydrogen bomb tests to secret mass medical experiments involving radiation, hallucinogens, and various pathogens.

In The Thanatos Syndrome, a rogue group of doctors and scientists administers heavy sodium ions to approximately 100,000 people in an area called West Feliciana via the water supply. Their ability to do this mirrors the kind of wrongdoing seen in scandals like Watergate and Irangate. Percy, being an exceptional writer, ensures that The Thanatos Syndrome intelligently addresses these complex issues without reducing them to a simple battle between good—embodied by the innocent public—and evil—represented by a nefarious group of technocrats. The actions of this Fedville clique, led by a character named Dr. Bob Comeaux and guided by the scientific expertise of John Van Dorn, are driven by concerns over the declining quality of American life. This concern goes beyond the Cold War paranoia about material wealth. As Van Dorn explains, the nation faces plagues of nearly biblical scale: crime, teenage suicide, drug abuse, and AIDS. He presents alarming statistics to back his claims. Unfortunately, as Percy illustrates, the Fedville doctors' focus on treating symptoms rather than addressing the root causes only exacerbates the tragedy.

In numerous aspects, The Thanatos Syndrome can be seen as a follow-up to Love in the Ruins, although this was not the original intention. The protagonist in Love in the Ruins represented a significant shift for the author. Inspired to craft such an expansive narrative—albeit limited to the first four days of July—due to America's upcoming bicentennial celebration, Percy explored a subject as significant as the nation's condition: the psychological state of humanity at the end of the second millennium. Considering the epic and occasionally mythical breadth of his vision, it's not surprising that More creates a futuristic device called the ontological lapsometer. Using this portable gadget, and with the comical—and disastrous—assistance of the Devil himself (disguised as Art Immelman, an unusually odd foundation bureaucrat), More tries to diagnose society's ailments. He evaluates these issues using a spectrum that spans from "angelism" (pseudo-intellectualized abstraction) to "bestialism" (complete mindless indulgence).

As described by a New York Times reviewer, Love in the Ruins was "Percy's most ambitious novel to date," and it continues to stand as a comedic, epic, and philosophical masterpiece in his body of work. The novel's themes, including its more timely ones such as the 1968 race riots, referenced through the Bantu riots and disturbances in the fictional Feliciana, maintain their relevance for today's readers (as evidenced by the Los Angeles riots of the 1990s). The book's language—vibrant, robust, and eccentric like Tom More himself—remains one of the most remarkable achievements in American literature. This novel showcases Walker Percy at his finest: an author who captivates readers worldwide with the sheer strength and creativity of his storytelling, consistently serving a deeper philosophical purpose.