In an article published almost twenty years ago, Walker Percy talked of modern man's peculiar predicament, the result of secular man living under the protection of a tradition he ridicules and of religious man being unable to live the life his faith demands. Percy compares "our posture" to that of "the cat in the cartoon who ran off the cliff and found himself standing up in the air. Maybe he can get back to earth by backing up; on the other hand he might be in for a radical change of perspective."… After three novels showing the contortions of the cat in midair, Percy's new novel, Lancelot, is a dialogue between secular man and religious man on what the world may look like once the cat discovers that he is too far from the cliff to get back. (p. 186)

Lancelot clarifies his position through a mad black/white reduction of moral choices. Despite its limitations, such a reduction may be seductive to those of us tired of the complicated—and often fruitless—ironies of modern life. In questioning Lancelot's sanity, we are led to the central ethical question: How do we avoid the intolerance of false simplicity without slipping into the quagmire of relativism? Percy's answer seems to be that ethical questions ultimately have religious answers. Thus Percy uses Lancelot not only as a voice for satire, but also—and primarily—as an object of satire. Though Percy would agree that all the ills Lancelot rails against are deplorable, he suggests that these ills are best seen as symptoms of an even more serious disease than the moral decay which has existed in even the most religious societies. Lancelot's disease is full-fledged secularism, left unchecked by his refusal to accept the adulterated vaccine of contemporary religion….

To adapt one of Percy's analogies, religious man and secular man agree that man finds himself on an island in space. There, for the purists on either side, the resemblance stops. To the religious, the island is not man's home; he is a castaway who has found himself washed ashore. For advice on returning home and on how best to treat his fellow islanders in the meantime, the religious man relies on messages that have been sent from across the sea. (p. 187)

To the secularists, bottle-watching is worthless since the contents of the bottles cannot be determined as true or false by any standards of island knowledge. But for Percy, the empirically verifiable/nonsense dichotomy drawn by the secularist begs the question. Instead Percy distinguishes three kinds of messages: (1) knowledge sub specie aeternitatis—knowledge that "can be arrived at anywhere by anyone and at any time," such as the discoveries of science and art; (2) island news—information relevant to our life at a particular moment on the island, such as being told that one's hut is burning; (3) news from across the sea—a message that speaks to our predicament as castaways. (p. 188)

[Lancelot] deceives himself because he assumes his lack of purpose—a sign of unacknowledged homesickness—can be cured by knowledge instead of news from across the sea…. In its most advanced stages, unacknowledged homesickness—alienation from one's self that results from an inability to accept alienation as man's natural state—causes man to need disaster to feel alive once he is jaded by pleasures.

Yet in his alcoholic stupor, Lancelot at least realizes the need to be watchful, to wait for news. However, the fact that he looks to the Ten O'Clock News for this important message concerning the individual's predicament indicates his misunderstanding of the nature of genuine news…. Lancelot's method [reveals] his desire to achieve certainty about human actions by reducing human complexities to physical events that can be recorded on film, thus eliminating the slipperiness of human thoughts and feelings that must be expressed in easily feigned words.

But there is madness in his method, though his madness is double-edged like Gulliver's. We find Lancelot's madness disturbing just as we are upset by Gulliver's preferring the horses in the stable to his family. Both rejections are difficult to accept even though we may feel that the reasons behind them are not that insane. Yet just as we reject Gulliver's uncompromising rationality as inhuman, the more we learn of Lancelot, the more we want a comfortable distance between ourselves and him. While we may sympathize with Lancelot's attack on the devaluation of language used to excuse sexual casualness, we sense a clinical element in his nature that scares us as sin touches his own life. Though keenly aware of his own feelings, Lancelot fails to acknowledge the limits of his moral position…. For Lancelot, without belief in God to provide a sense of transcendence, "loving a woman" becomes man's only absolute, gives man his only notion of infinity.

The problem with love, according to Lancelot himself, is that "ordinary sexual love" is the only love we can be sure exists. And unlike the nature of God, the sacredness of sexual love is a matter of perspective…. Lancelot has no perspective from which to judge the true view of sex.

Thus his desire to revenge Margot's unfaithfulness—like his anger at the promiscuity of his age—is groundless. (pp. 188-90)

Thus Lancelot attempts to re-establish an ethical order with even less foundation than Christian traditionalists. His only principle is negative, that he cannot tolerate the present age; instead he wants a simpler society…. Lancelot needs this reductive simplicity—life as the "simple scholastic syllogism" as he calls it elsewhere—because he has no means of dealing with the complexity of life when choices are not clear-cut, where women, for example, are too complex to be easily categorized as whores or ladies. Lancelot's insistence on knowing where one stands reduces human choices to a scientific problem.

For Percy, the failure of secular humanism is radical; stopgap measures eventually collapse when the chasm between the concrete person and the abstract theory becomes too wide. In pragmatic terms, there may be much to praise in the social and economic improvements fostered by secular humanism in its various forms. But in man's most crucial relationships with God and reality, secular humanism is bankrupt because it tells man nothing about himself as an individual, only about himself as an organism. If man accepts himself as merely an organism and the "ethical twilight of Christianity" becomes the dark "environment" of secularism, even murder becomes a trivial act: "Not even the knife at his throat seemed to make any difference. All it came down to was steel molecules entering skin molecules, artery molecules, blood cells." For Lancelot, it is an easy step from sex as molecules rubbing to murder as molecules separating. (p. 191)

Lancelot [is] a dialogue rather than a monologue: not just in the technical sense that Percival finally speaks at the very end, but in the sense that what he leaves unsaid—or finds unspeakable—is just as important to Percy's theme as Lancelot's raving. For Lancelot is as much a chronicle of the failure of contemporary religion as a satire on secularism. (p. 192)

While the most obvious satire is directed against conservative Christians, a quieter but equally damaging indictment is made against religious liberals like Percival. Percival's hipness, his role as a psychiatrist, cancels his effectiveness as a priest. As a radical solution to man's predicament, Christianity cannot come from the same roots as the problem; it cannot attempt to make man feel at home where he does not belong. Psychiatrists try to cure alienation, to make man feel adjusted, to teach him to lead a "meaningful" life in a secular city. The priest's duty is just the opposite, to insist man see himself as a castaway, as a being who should be alienated as long as he is estranged from God. (p. 193)

If one agrees with Percy that the growing darkness is not temporary, then Lancelot is, and this is highest praise, a timely novel. It has flaws: the irony is at times so heavy-handed that Percy's thumb gets in the picture; and with a few exceptions, the characters are too easily ignored because they are labeled so clearly. Still, there is much to admire in the powerful, hard-earned simplicity of Percy's style and his typically captivating opening and careful pacing. Most importantly, Walker Percy ranks with Swift as that rare accomplished acrobat, the novelist who can balance interesting fiction with serious ideas. (p. 194)