Walker Percy

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A Novel of Powerful Treasures

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In "The Last Gentleman" (1966), Will Barrett was 25 and suffered from attacks of amnesia. Now in "The Second Coming"—his reappearance is one of the meanings of the title—he is near 50 and suffers from attacks of memory. Something is certainly wrong: he is also prone to fall down and black out momentarily. But most chilling are those instants … when every detail of a past time comes flooding back upon him. One such memory returns in installments throughout the first half of the novel, until finally Will has confronted and solved a mystery of his youth: what really happened the day when, hunting together in a pin-oak swamp in Georgia, his father attempted suicide with a hunting rifle, and Will, too, was wounded.

The swamp memory is a bit of dark, woozy, Faulknerian melodrama, a tale of the Old South smuggled into what is in every other way a closely-observed novel of the "New." (p. 1)

Before the attempted suicide, Will's father had made the dire prediction that Will would turn out to be "one of us": that is, one of the doomed and brooding and unbelieving to whom life, ungarnished by illusion, was an affliction and an offense. The prediction nags at Will, but now that he has entered upon his own consideration of suicide, his ultimate concerns turn out to be rather different in tone from his father's. His father's outrage was romantic—Byron ranting on the banks of the Mississippi. Will Barrett, a more temperate figure, has come to doubt that he exists at all as a cogent self having weight and occupying space…. (pp. 1, 28)

[Walker Percy] is a novelist of ideas, which in the case of a very good novelist [such as Percy] does not mean that plot and character are merely pretexts for philosophical investigations. Rather it refers to what is at stake in the outcomes of events that are tracked and lives that are examined. And although his best characters are fully realized and knowable persons, although he has brought great and careful energy to bear upon the study of a particular region of the country at a historically discreet moment, what is at stake in Percy's fiction is not finally personal or local.

Instead, he is testing certain concepts, traditional ones, such as the concept that one person might come to know and love another, and that language might actually assist rather than deter that process; or the concept that a life might be lived in some authentic relation to its own chief events, such as a father's suicide or a marriage, without the need to distort or repress or deny; or the concept that there are impulses, casual and shaping, that lie outside whatever scientific account we can take of ourselves, and that if we bring ourselves to consciousness of such impulses it is possible that we can be delivered, "hoisted," from the trivia and tawdriness that clutter personal existence in daily life—the concept, in short, of God, and the prospects for transcendence, here, now, in America.

I say that he is "testing" these concepts, but there is no pretense, fortunately, of objectivity. He is abundantly committed … to their viability. Nor does it matter, in the end, whether or not the reader is convinced. The demonstrations are compelling and interesting and artful in themselves, and we can't help but be struck by the sense of a powerful relevance in it all….

There is another character besides Will Barrett in "The Second Coming," a parallel character, in whose treatment Percy conveys an excitement beyond the ideational. Allison, 19, has escaped from a mental institution after a series of electroshock treatments, and taken up residence in a deserted greenhouse which she has learned was bequeathed to her by an old aunt. She sets about making the green-house livable with a deliberateness, a tentativeness and an ingenuity that are at once poignant and invigorating.

Here again Percy is a poet, but this time a poet in the design of situations: a rare quality in a novelist whose purposes are so consciously intellectual…. Allison conjures up Huck Finn and Robinson Crusoe and Hester Prynne and others, isolate, outcast homemakers, in flight from a damaging society for which they are yet lonely…. (p. 28)

What happens is that she is befriended, and more than befriended, by Will Barrett…. The story is not probable, but it works to make two effects perfectly heart-rending. One is that Will and Allison undertake to save each other; he falls, she hoists. The other is that the grim soulless world of the Southern suburban haute-bourgeoisie sets itself against their happiness.

I hope I have made it plain that "The Second Coming" is wonderfully good reading. Not only is the satire—on contemporary religious movements, club manners, old people's homes—apt and clever and entertaining, but there are also more powerful pleasures. The scene in which Will Barrett and Allison meet is as well-judged a stretch of prose as I have read in a contemporary novel in years. Significances both beautiful and sturdy swarm in the fact that Will Barrett understands the arcane and convoluted wordplay which Percy has Allison speak—and we are persuaded, all deeply and simply, that this would indeed be so, that their alienation could and would dovetail in just this elegant way. It is, all in all, a hard-won moment of interpersonal transcendence, the discovery in another person of what George Eliot famously called "an equivalent center of self."

My reservations all have to do with the theological burden—under which, I hasten to add, this author has no choice but to labor. It is finally indistinguishable from his art, so that there is no point implying that he would be a better novelist without it. But he can't expect not to provoke disagreement on issues he has succeeded in making palpable. (pp. 28-9)

Allison's solitude and eccentricity erode, a little, the point one would suppose Walker Percy to be making—that we can look for God, or transcendence, or something just like them, in the society we are born to. Her example suggests that we would do better in our search for truth to go off in the woods or put to sea. That is just what we are told to do in many classic American novels; but one had hoped that a writer as socially sensitive and humanistic as Walker Percy might have contrived to relieve the high-principled loneliness of our tradition. However, despite his astute observation of society, he gives it no more real pertinence to the making of self and soul than any of our 19th-century Yankees.

My second reservation is a theological doubt outright. The doubt, excited by Percy's characteristic concerns, is whether a transcendent religious conviction and an ultimate attachment to other people are not finally incompatible. I am not saying this is so, but rather that Percy's fictions are constructed in such a way that this literally awful insight must for an instant glimmer—but that he then does not fully take responsibility for it. If it is a doubt he himself has had, he has not yet wrestled with it publicly. Allison, a remarkable creation in every other respect, is in this one sense a species of evasion: she is too much the fairy wood nymph, the holy idiot and sainted outsider to answer our questions about Percy's ultimate commitment to common humanity.

Nevertheless, "The Second Coming" is, among recent novels, masterly and superior. It is a more consistent and more centered work than "The Last Gentleman"—I believe it is Walker Percy's best since "The Moviegoer." The contemporary audience, given its apparent mood, can hardly be expected to welcome a novel of ideas, even such a splendid, engrossing one as this; but it would be most regrettable if large numbers of readers did not avail themselves of the complex but certain joy that Walker Percy confers here. (p. 29)

John Romano, "A Novel of Powerful Treasures," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1980 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), June 29, 1980, pp. 1, 28-9.

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