The Percy Perplex
[The Second Coming] is sad, sensual, self-pitying, and unresolved. It fails as a romance, fails as a character novel, fails as a confession, succeeds uncomfortably well as a stoical groan. One winces, and turns away, and then, because its irony dilutes the horror, reads on….
The plot of The Second Coming careens between Allison's endearing, doggerel madness … and Will's grim, crazed, suicidal gambit for a proof of God. One suspects Percy reined in his characters whenever their lively, stubborn self-interest overshadowed his relentless God-talk. Emotional drama shoved aside, Percy opts for melodrama….
Allison is less a character than a philosophical construct—one of Percy's "castaways" on an industrialized, amoral island who secretly combs the beach for sometime-true, sometime-false messages in bottles—so one is not unduly annoyed by the turn that a middle-aged depressive, who is eventually diagnosed as suffering from Hausmann's Syndrome (a pH and brain problem), is repaired of his "inappropriate longings" by his love and lust for a manipulative child who may cure herself with orgasms. Percy has always consistently wedded his characters' metaphysical maladies with corresponding, but no less mysterious, problems in medicine. It's the latent scientist in him who will not accede to the argument that a measured, engineered world has no place for those unquantifiable creatures, angels of the Lord.
One is more irritated by Percy's indifference to the life of and lives in his novel…. The Second Coming, like The Last Gentleman, is stuffed with characters who deserve attention, judgement, rescue, but Percy will not do it. For untold reasons—and one cannot accept the suggestion that a man this talented lacks the will—Percy will not deliver a Dostoevskian novel of the New South.
Percy refuses a rigorous resolution for The Second Coming, providing instead, and arguably necessarily, a low-key, sentimental finish, as in Love In the Ruins, overloading it with tangential good works and wry puzzles. Percy sidesteps Will Barrett's neat proposition: If these are the Last Days, how should one act? There is the intriguing inference that those waiting for the end should cleave to an affair of the heart and remain humble, hopeful, brisk. But Percy is oddly ambiguous as to how sincere he is about recommending love before the ruins.
Structurally, The Second Coming lacks a beginning (unless The Last Gentleman so serves) as well as an ending, and the result is a novel that is heavily philosophical and pinched—all middle. This middle, if read for its reproach, sorrow, frustration, is too powerful stuff, too heart-breaking, and freezing, for gray days and dark thinkers. Yet, once drawn into the laconic, remorseful dynamic of Percy's work, one craves more, and sterner, and darker. Percy might not want to deliver such, of course, because if he were to shed his stoic's mantle of irony he might himself have no defense from, and not enough tears for, the truths he might find in the figurative bottle on the figurative beach. A character of his once said, however, that the trying is the victory, and one selfishly urges Percy to pursue his obsession to a conclusion, whatever the risk of ruin and blasphemy, that he blanches from in this brave, mortal book.
John Calvin Batchelor, "The Percy Perplex," in The Village Voice (reprinted by permission of The Village Voice; copyright © News Group Publications, Inc., 1980), Vol. XXV, No. 28, July 9-15, 1980, p. 34.
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