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Love in the Ruins #2
The Thanatos Syndrome
When Dr. Tom More is released on parole from state prison, he returns to Feliciana, Louisiana, the parish where he was born and bred, where he practiced psychiatry before his arrest. He immediately notices something strange in almost everyone around him: unusual sexual behavior in women patients, a bizarre loss of inhibition, his own wife's extraordinary success as bridge tournaments, during which her mind seems to function like a computer. With the help of his attractive cousin, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, Dr. More begins to uncover a criminal experimentto "improve" people's behavior by drugging the local water supply. But beyond this scheme are activities so sinister that Dr. More can only wonder if the whole world has gone crazy -- or he has . . .
409 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
About the author
Walker Percy
51 books766 followersWalker Percy was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Trained as a physician at Columbia University, Percy decided to become a writer after a bout of tuberculosis. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.
Trained as a physician at Columbia University, Percy decided to become a writer after a bout of tuberculosis. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 198 reviews
October 31, 2016
"It is not for me to say whether one should try to be happy -- although it always struck me as an odd pursuit, like trying to be blue-eyed--"
--Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome.
Probably 3.5 stars. Not my favorite Walker Percy, and definitely not the one to start with. It starts with dark humor and absurdism and twists into a creepy weird horror show and slowly wades the reader back out.
I get what Percy was doing here. I really do. I get the metaphor, but ye gads, it wasn't exactly a joyride. There were parts I absolutely adored. So, if you have never read Percy, kick this one down your list. If, however, you have already read The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, The Second Coming, sure, yeah, knock your self out. Just look out. It is like eating a 7 Pot Primo pepper. Sucker is going to burn, kick, and sting.
Ultimately, Percy gives away his big point with a flashback from the crazy priest sitting in the watchtower. The mad priest and Dr. Tom More discuss modernism, psychology, and the rise of the Nazi bureaucracy in the early 20th century. The point I think Walker is trying to convey in most of his books is the Modern World, with its technologies, drugs, philosophies, etc., has kind of left us unprotected. Some of those things that seem, from a utilitarian view, to improve our lives will probably end up deadening our existence. The one institution that might be able to warn us, protect us, provide some level of comfort and security after we have been stripped bare by Modernism -- the Church -- is starved, weakened and almost unable to give us the basic rituals and nourishment we need to combat the technocrats, bureaucracies, and wicked forces that latch onto Modernism (I don't think Percy is arguing that Modernism itself is evil, simply that it efficiently plows the ground for evil seeds). Anyway, this is Percy's BIG THEME and he just hits it really hard, over and over, in this book.
"In the end one must chose--given the chance."
--Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome.
Probably 3.5 stars. Not my favorite Walker Percy, and definitely not the one to start with. It starts with dark humor and absurdism and twists into a creepy weird horror show and slowly wades the reader back out.
I get what Percy was doing here. I really do. I get the metaphor, but ye gads, it wasn't exactly a joyride. There were parts I absolutely adored. So, if you have never read Percy, kick this one down your list. If, however, you have already read The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, The Second Coming, sure, yeah, knock your self out. Just look out. It is like eating a 7 Pot Primo pepper. Sucker is going to burn, kick, and sting.
Ultimately, Percy gives away his big point with a flashback from the crazy priest sitting in the watchtower. The mad priest and Dr. Tom More discuss modernism, psychology, and the rise of the Nazi bureaucracy in the early 20th century. The point I think Walker is trying to convey in most of his books is the Modern World, with its technologies, drugs, philosophies, etc., has kind of left us unprotected. Some of those things that seem, from a utilitarian view, to improve our lives will probably end up deadening our existence. The one institution that might be able to warn us, protect us, provide some level of comfort and security after we have been stripped bare by Modernism -- the Church -- is starved, weakened and almost unable to give us the basic rituals and nourishment we need to combat the technocrats, bureaucracies, and wicked forces that latch onto Modernism (I don't think Percy is arguing that Modernism itself is evil, simply that it efficiently plows the ground for evil seeds). Anyway, this is Percy's BIG THEME and he just hits it really hard, over and over, in this book.
"In the end one must chose--given the chance."
December 16, 2017
Pleasantly surprised. I'll admit I was assigned this book in a Southern Lit class at university and never read it. The best part is there's an interesting overlying story on top of the underlying literary allusions. Entertaining and strange. I really liked it. Will definitely have to read his award winner, The Moviegoer.
May 21, 2017
Read for book club.
It had some good points, but I thought the story was disjointed the narrative voice was uncomfortable, and the ending was absurd. I was glad when it was over.
It had some good points, but I thought the story was disjointed the narrative voice was uncomfortable, and the ending was absurd. I was glad when it was over.
August 1, 2021
Walker Percy is one of my favorite writers. I liked The Last Gentleman so much that I gave copies of it to all of my clients as Christmas presents. The Moviegoer is brilliant. Mr. Percy's books are populated with seekers who sometimes don't know that they are seeking anything but who manage to find enlightenment by unusual routes. There are always interesting philosophical perspectives, and it all takes place in a wonderful Deep South of Mr. Percy's imagination, poplulated by colorful people who embody the things that I treasure about Southern culture and tinged with only a smidgen of the bad things - just enough of the bad to make them seem realistic.
The Thanatos Syndrome has all of these things, but unfortunately they are served up in much smaller measure than in the other Percy novels that I have read. All of the good stuff is rolled up in a potboiler thriller about a rogue government program to chemically control the population with runoff from a nuclear reactor. There are still flashes of the Percy I love in this book, particularly in the character of Father Smith, the crazy priest who understands how close good intentions about managing people can be to pure evil. But somehow in the end I felt that this book was a bit of a sell out where Mr. Percy was trying capture a Robert Ludlum/James Patterson mass audience and in the process watered down the things that I most love about his writing.
The Thanatos Syndrome has all of these things, but unfortunately they are served up in much smaller measure than in the other Percy novels that I have read. All of the good stuff is rolled up in a potboiler thriller about a rogue government program to chemically control the population with runoff from a nuclear reactor. There are still flashes of the Percy I love in this book, particularly in the character of Father Smith, the crazy priest who understands how close good intentions about managing people can be to pure evil. But somehow in the end I felt that this book was a bit of a sell out where Mr. Percy was trying capture a Robert Ludlum/James Patterson mass audience and in the process watered down the things that I most love about his writing.
November 17, 2014
Not exactly what you'd expect from Walker Percy, and the GoodReads write-up doesn't begin to give you a sense of what this book is about (for starters, it's published in the '80s so someone should fix that blurb!), The Thanatos Syndrome sounds like a Ludlum novel from the get-go and reads a little like one, too, although a less-forumulaic Ludlum novel penned by a far more literary author.
I read it in Nepal back in 1988, a brand-new paperback sent to me by Tom Yates that I sold off a few weeks later when I was done to a second-hand book seller in Thamel for a few rupees to buy apple pie and daal bhaat.
Today, I remember little about the novel, other than the drinking water supply of a town in Louisiana being tainted with chemicals resulting in highly sexualized behavior by otherwise not-so sexual individuals.
Pages were turned and details rapidly forgotten, and these three stars are really based on nothing more than a favorable impression that has lasted with me over the past three decades. So read it if you like. I don't care. I'd actually say it's better than The Moviegoer, but there's probably no one else in the world who'd agree with me. I don't know what was wrong with me when I read The Moviegoer, but I just did not like that book at all...
I read it in Nepal back in 1988, a brand-new paperback sent to me by Tom Yates that I sold off a few weeks later when I was done to a second-hand book seller in Thamel for a few rupees to buy apple pie and daal bhaat.
Today, I remember little about the novel, other than the drinking water supply of a town in Louisiana being tainted with chemicals resulting in highly sexualized behavior by otherwise not-so sexual individuals.
Pages were turned and details rapidly forgotten, and these three stars are really based on nothing more than a favorable impression that has lasted with me over the past three decades. So read it if you like. I don't care. I'd actually say it's better than The Moviegoer, but there's probably no one else in the world who'd agree with me. I don't know what was wrong with me when I read The Moviegoer, but I just did not like that book at all...
May 1, 2012
Not sure why, as an one-time English major with a brother who loved this author's books, it's taken me so long to discover Walker Percy. An amazing read. At one point near the end it got pretty disturbing, but the questions he raises about life and death are important and fascinating. I was also intrigued by one character's harangue which included this:
"These are strange times. There are now two kinds of people. This has never happened before. One are decent, tenderhearted, unbelieving, philanthropic people. The other are some preachers who tell the truth about the Lord but are themselves often rascals if not thieves . . . What a generation! Believing thieves and decent unbelievers! The Great Depriver's finest hour!"
As someone who is always searching for God OUTSIDE of specifically religious literature, I found this book just the type of thing I look for. (Disturbing content notwithstanding.)
"These are strange times. There are now two kinds of people. This has never happened before. One are decent, tenderhearted, unbelieving, philanthropic people. The other are some preachers who tell the truth about the Lord but are themselves often rascals if not thieves . . . What a generation! Believing thieves and decent unbelievers! The Great Depriver's finest hour!"
As someone who is always searching for God OUTSIDE of specifically religious literature, I found this book just the type of thing I look for. (Disturbing content notwithstanding.)
January 10, 2023
Everything here is a bit spoiler by because - goodness gracious — DO NOT read the blurb for this book or half the underlying plot is revealed. How annoying. So if I drop hints below I don't feel too bad. You have been warned.
Anyway, I am reading this for our first podcast episode - #298 of 2023. I'm close to 200 pages in and all I can say at the moment is - since the jacket cover ruined things - did Joss Whedon read this before he made Serenity?
This is a very slow start unless you like books that talk and talk and talk without much else happening. I think that's a commonly made critique of Walker Percy. If you are someone who likes a leisurely, chatty pace then this is not going to be a problem for you. I am not one of those people so I just kept reading and around the 150-200 page mark I was rewarded when the book turned to mystery, conspiracy, and a desperate search for solution in the face of hostile pursuers. Now that is my kind of book.
FINAL
I liked talking about the book more than I liked reading it. Percy Walker's writing style isn't one that appeals to me so that's part of my problem. And then, you can't like every author. However, the ideas were good, the worldview Catholic, and the problems he's writing about are very current. Recommended.
Anyway, I am reading this for our first podcast episode - #298 of 2023. I'm close to 200 pages in and all I can say at the moment is - since the jacket cover ruined things - did Joss Whedon read this before he made Serenity?
This is a very slow start unless you like books that talk and talk and talk without much else happening. I think that's a commonly made critique of Walker Percy. If you are someone who likes a leisurely, chatty pace then this is not going to be a problem for you. I am not one of those people so I just kept reading and around the 150-200 page mark I was rewarded when the book turned to mystery, conspiracy, and a desperate search for solution in the face of hostile pursuers. Now that is my kind of book.
FINAL
I liked talking about the book more than I liked reading it. Percy Walker's writing style isn't one that appeals to me so that's part of my problem. And then, you can't like every author. However, the ideas were good, the worldview Catholic, and the problems he's writing about are very current. Recommended.
December 23, 2011
An utterly fascinating read! great story, great characters, air of mystery, sense of humor ... my pleasant surprise of the holidays so far!
The above paragraph is something I wrote 40% of the way through the book, which I've now finished. I suppose there was no way it could have lived up to the high expectations it engendered, but I'm still giving it 3.5-to-4 stars.
Despite my generally tolerant view toward books with "disturbing" content, I have to say I was somewhat rattled by this one. I believe the author does go a bit overboard with his depictions of some of the unsavory events that transpire in this book, and I would therefore -- sadly -- not recommend Thanatos Syndrome to readers who are easily offended. This is a shame, actually, because the serious issues the book treats are very much worth thinking about, and I'm grateful to Walker Percy for giving us a narrative where we are forced to think about them. And I do stand by my initial assessment of Thanatos Syndrome in terms of the characters, the plot, and flow of the narrative. Even when things started to become disturbing, the book was still all but impossible to put down. If you can rein in your "sensitivities", the book is just too Good a Read to ignore.
The above paragraph is something I wrote 40% of the way through the book, which I've now finished. I suppose there was no way it could have lived up to the high expectations it engendered, but I'm still giving it 3.5-to-4 stars.
Despite my generally tolerant view toward books with "disturbing" content, I have to say I was somewhat rattled by this one. I believe the author does go a bit overboard with his depictions of some of the unsavory events that transpire in this book, and I would therefore -- sadly -- not recommend Thanatos Syndrome to readers who are easily offended. This is a shame, actually, because the serious issues the book treats are very much worth thinking about, and I'm grateful to Walker Percy for giving us a narrative where we are forced to think about them. And I do stand by my initial assessment of Thanatos Syndrome in terms of the characters, the plot, and flow of the narrative. Even when things started to become disturbing, the book was still all but impossible to put down. If you can rein in your "sensitivities", the book is just too Good a Read to ignore.
December 21, 2023
I am a sucker for Walker Percy—many of his books are a slog to get through but always end well and are humbling in a comforting way, despite there rarely ever being any resolution to the characters’ problems. This one was had some dark scenes that weren’t fun to read but were necessary to make his point. I recommend reading The Moviegoer or Lost in the Cosmos before this one.
“I discovered that what terrifies people is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. ‘They,’ the experts, know, don’t they?”
“It is not for me to say whether one should try to be happy—though it always struck me as an odd pursuit, like trying to be blue-eyed—or whether one should try to beat all the other jaybirds on the block. But it is my observation that neither pursuit succeeds very well. I only know that people who said their hearts on either usually end up seeing me (a psychiatrist) or somebody like me, or having heart attacks or climbing into a bottle.”
“I discovered that what terrifies people is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. ‘They,’ the experts, know, don’t they?”
“It is not for me to say whether one should try to be happy—though it always struck me as an odd pursuit, like trying to be blue-eyed—or whether one should try to beat all the other jaybirds on the block. But it is my observation that neither pursuit succeeds very well. I only know that people who said their hearts on either usually end up seeing me (a psychiatrist) or somebody like me, or having heart attacks or climbing into a bottle.”
November 30, 2023
I know that most have good reason to write this book as three out of five stars, and in fact, when I finished the first book, with this set of characters, I didn’t even want to read this one because of how much I loved the first one. However, if I could allow myself, I would give it five stars. While it’s a bit heavy-handed and a little bit less artistic—my understanding of this as his last fictional work is incredibly meaningful to me as I work my way through his oeuvre. It is the only book of his that has not only made me feel more sane, and made me both howl in anguish and cry in hope. Walker Percy, I love you.
January 11, 2025
Not sure, Doc… Father… There’s a part of me— with Dorothy Day— thinking I don’t know if I get it, maybe it’s too new, good luck to you, God be with you till we meet again—a large part of me still unconvinced it all boils down to sex, feels that’s (ironically) regressive— an ungenerous part frustrated with the “Well”s and “Sure”s you meet so much of the world with, and so many women. But it is fun to see so much of O’Connor peeking through, flowers and strangers and tenderness. The ending— the very ending— was extremely fine.
December 24, 2021
Percy makes you suffer through pages of turgid prose to get to brilliantly insightful lines, about once per 10 pages. He’s not subtle, but entirely correct about the modern Ivan Fyodoroviches in our elite today…
January 10, 2025
Agenda-driven claptrap, neither interesting nor provocative.
September 21, 2013
WOW! I didn't realize Walker Percy was so one dimensional. Just so everybody knows, this book is just an excuse to label anybody pro-choice as someone who approves and, he implies, joyfully endorses killing babys up to and over a year old. And he also lumps aggressive euthanasia of aging and sick people in what the real world calls pro-choice.
A quick aside; this book is written in the style where you feel the main character is really just a puppet for the author to tell you his views. And in this one he creates a world of arguments all built of straw which he easily and justifiably knocks down.
There is a lot of padding and the bulk of the plot involves a behavior control technique using chemicals surreptitiously delivered in a fluoridation like method via the water supply. The problem is Anthony Burgess tackled the topic with much more intelligence and honesty in A Clockwork Orange . Alex in the Burgess book is bad enough that you could realistically argue the world would be better off if the Ludavico technique was left in place. In Percy's story the ultra high sodium added to the water (who knew salt as capable of mind control?) produced depraved side effects in almost everybody. So there is absolutely no one who would support this idea, fictional or real.
In the novel the Supreme court did not rule on a woman's right to her body, they ruled on defining person-hood as starting at 18 months. Jeez, even in a novel there has to be some relation to the real world
“You're talking about violating the law of the land, gentlemen” he says quietly. “Doe vs. Dade, the landmark case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court which decreed, with solid scientific evidence that the human infant does not achieve personhood until eighteen month” pg 333
Doe vs. Dade...give me a break! In that section they are talking about a center that routinely kills infants and old people....give me another break!
If he meant it as a fable he should have made it clearer and I think the speech by the crazy priest toward the end shows it is not a fable and it seems to be to be the what it was all leading to...
“Listen to me, dear physicians, dear brothers, dear Qualitarians, abortionists, euthanasists!.....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-I beg only....Please send them to us. Don't kill them!” pg 361
Notice there is no mention of a woman's body or her choice and when sperm/egg becomes human. In this world people are not concerned about such things.
The main points of the book are you save your soul through psychiatry and not through drugs and if you are willing to kill a zygote you are willing to kill an infant (and an old person as well).
Philip K Dick wrote a short story where the age of personhood kept advancing, to the point youngsters run about trying to avoid the abortion police. It was way more honest and made the point that deciding when human-ness starts is arbitrary. I think he is wrong to say that since it is unclear, it means personhood starts with the zygote. But at least Dick was more effective in making his point.
Almost 30 years ago I read some of Percy's novels and remember telling people I thought they were good. But now I am scared to revisit those early books since I kind of hope a writer learns something as they live their life, so perhaps the other novels are just as flat and I was taken in by the idea he was supposed to be a good writer. Of course it was easy to read, so I still gave it 2 stars.
A quick aside; this book is written in the style where you feel the main character is really just a puppet for the author to tell you his views. And in this one he creates a world of arguments all built of straw which he easily and justifiably knocks down.
There is a lot of padding and the bulk of the plot involves a behavior control technique using chemicals surreptitiously delivered in a fluoridation like method via the water supply. The problem is Anthony Burgess tackled the topic with much more intelligence and honesty in A Clockwork Orange . Alex in the Burgess book is bad enough that you could realistically argue the world would be better off if the Ludavico technique was left in place. In Percy's story the ultra high sodium added to the water (who knew salt as capable of mind control?) produced depraved side effects in almost everybody. So there is absolutely no one who would support this idea, fictional or real.
In the novel the Supreme court did not rule on a woman's right to her body, they ruled on defining person-hood as starting at 18 months. Jeez, even in a novel there has to be some relation to the real world
“You're talking about violating the law of the land, gentlemen” he says quietly. “Doe vs. Dade, the landmark case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court which decreed, with solid scientific evidence that the human infant does not achieve personhood until eighteen month” pg 333
Doe vs. Dade...give me a break! In that section they are talking about a center that routinely kills infants and old people....give me another break!
If he meant it as a fable he should have made it clearer and I think the speech by the crazy priest toward the end shows it is not a fable and it seems to be to be the what it was all leading to...
“Listen to me, dear physicians, dear brothers, dear Qualitarians, abortionists, euthanasists!.....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-I beg only....Please send them to us. Don't kill them!” pg 361
Notice there is no mention of a woman's body or her choice and when sperm/egg becomes human. In this world people are not concerned about such things.
The main points of the book are you save your soul through psychiatry and not through drugs and if you are willing to kill a zygote you are willing to kill an infant (and an old person as well).
Philip K Dick wrote a short story where the age of personhood kept advancing, to the point youngsters run about trying to avoid the abortion police. It was way more honest and made the point that deciding when human-ness starts is arbitrary. I think he is wrong to say that since it is unclear, it means personhood starts with the zygote. But at least Dick was more effective in making his point.
Almost 30 years ago I read some of Percy's novels and remember telling people I thought they were good. But now I am scared to revisit those early books since I kind of hope a writer learns something as they live their life, so perhaps the other novels are just as flat and I was taken in by the idea he was supposed to be a good writer. Of course it was easy to read, so I still gave it 2 stars.
January 12, 2009
Here Percy is profound: psychologically astute and socially prescient. He knows people--the human condition, our querks, our excuses, our dilemmas. He knows us inside and out. And in _The Thanatos Syndrome_, Percy puts his own medical-school knowledge to work through his main character Tom More, M.D., a floundering psychiatrist, and numerous other medically-inclined characters dealing with (ahem) a syndrome.
Percy is smart--he doesn't need me to tell him so (especially, alas, post mortem). In this novel, I enjoyed not only the suspenseful story and intriguing characters (though More is a bit anemic, it seems to me) but Percy's writerly (and I'd say) wonderful way with words and ideas. In revealing his understanding of us humans, he brings to light our fear of choice, which is really a fear of ourSELVES. At one point More notes--in Percy's rich prose--this social phenomenon: "We [psychiatrists:] have mostly been superseded by brain engineers, neuropharmacologists, chemists of the synapses. And why not? If one can prescribe a chemical and overnight turn a haunted soul into a bustling little body, why take on such a quixotic quest as pursuing the sacred of one's very self?" (13). But Percy, for better or worse, is an advocate of the sacred self in all its "quixotic," troublesome, scared, unlovely, old, weak, lovely, genius forms. Again More notes, "It helps enormously when a patient can make friends with her terror, plumb the depths of her depression" (67). And quoting Jung, "There's gold down there in the darkness."
Indeed there is, and in this novel, Percy gives readers the darkness--depression, incest, infanticide, euthanasia, pedophilia--of humanity while unwaveringly holding on to the belief that this violent, turbulent, lovely life and living it as complex humans with volition is better than any novel idea or any medication that promises a quick fix to "solve" society's "problems." (Especially since, as we know, "problems" often start looking like people.)
Percy is smart--he doesn't need me to tell him so (especially, alas, post mortem). In this novel, I enjoyed not only the suspenseful story and intriguing characters (though More is a bit anemic, it seems to me) but Percy's writerly (and I'd say) wonderful way with words and ideas. In revealing his understanding of us humans, he brings to light our fear of choice, which is really a fear of ourSELVES. At one point More notes--in Percy's rich prose--this social phenomenon: "We [psychiatrists:] have mostly been superseded by brain engineers, neuropharmacologists, chemists of the synapses. And why not? If one can prescribe a chemical and overnight turn a haunted soul into a bustling little body, why take on such a quixotic quest as pursuing the sacred of one's very self?" (13). But Percy, for better or worse, is an advocate of the sacred self in all its "quixotic," troublesome, scared, unlovely, old, weak, lovely, genius forms. Again More notes, "It helps enormously when a patient can make friends with her terror, plumb the depths of her depression" (67). And quoting Jung, "There's gold down there in the darkness."
Indeed there is, and in this novel, Percy gives readers the darkness--depression, incest, infanticide, euthanasia, pedophilia--of humanity while unwaveringly holding on to the belief that this violent, turbulent, lovely life and living it as complex humans with volition is better than any novel idea or any medication that promises a quick fix to "solve" society's "problems." (Especially since, as we know, "problems" often start looking like people.)
January 30, 2016
I posted that I first read this book in 1995 and "finished" it in 2011. That's not really accurate. Actually, I've read it three times, and I'm sure I'll read it again.
I believe that Walker Percy is one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. No other writer has been able to explore existential themes and religious / moral themes with such humor and insight. But he doesn't preach. Rather, he draws us in with memorable characters and compelling stories. And he entertains!
When you finish a Percy novel, you shake your head in disbelief at the enormity of what you have just read.
I came across this book in a used paperback store in the mid-1990's. It appeared to be a thriller, concerning putting drugs in the water supply in a Louisiana town. Little did I know what I was in for.
After devouring it, I went back and read all of Percy's novels, starting with _The Moviegoer_. All are marvelous, but I believe his finest novels are his later ones: this one and _The Second Coming_ (another book that I've read three times).
Don't forget his non-fiction. _Lost in the Cosmos_ will have you laughing out loud, but at the same time, it contains great insight into the struggle of existentialism.
I believe that Walker Percy is one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. No other writer has been able to explore existential themes and religious / moral themes with such humor and insight. But he doesn't preach. Rather, he draws us in with memorable characters and compelling stories. And he entertains!
When you finish a Percy novel, you shake your head in disbelief at the enormity of what you have just read.
I came across this book in a used paperback store in the mid-1990's. It appeared to be a thriller, concerning putting drugs in the water supply in a Louisiana town. Little did I know what I was in for.
After devouring it, I went back and read all of Percy's novels, starting with _The Moviegoer_. All are marvelous, but I believe his finest novels are his later ones: this one and _The Second Coming_ (another book that I've read three times).
Don't forget his non-fiction. _Lost in the Cosmos_ will have you laughing out loud, but at the same time, it contains great insight into the struggle of existentialism.
July 25, 2019
Re-reading all of Percy's novels this summer has been a joy, and here he is outstanding as usual. There are aspects of this book that remind me of C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength - but Percy is the more profound novelist. Percy writes of a world in which "Reason warred with faith. Science triumphed. The upshot? One hundred million dead." In a world where an odd admixture of tenderness and utilitarianism reigns, the result is moral blindness tending to unspeakable crimes (a word of warning - those crimes are described in gut wrenching detail). I give the book 4 rather than 5 stars because the last 50 pages or so become too straightforwardly didactic, when various avenues seemed available to more subtly, and I think more effectively, develop his point by continuing to advance the storyline. Instead the conclusion felt to me a bit tacked on and forced. I wonder if Percy, nearing the end of his life, felt a need to be more explicit. I'd add that I agree with his argument, but it was not his best work as a novelist.
September 20, 2021
The Thanatos Syndrome was my first Walker Percy novel, recommended to me long ago by a respected pastor. Written in 1987, Thanatos is a thought provoking social critique. Is there really a well-funded group of elites who pursue wide scale social manipulation and control? Sounds too conspiratorial, doesn’t it? But we’ve seen it happen in history several times. With echoes of Grisham’s The Firm, Percy deals deftly with the conspiracy skeptics.
Percy also channels Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, exposing the nihilism that was hitting the main populace in the 80s, ironically amidst great material prosperity. The main character is a psychiatrist who sees it in patients he’s known for a long time. People are reaching out and experimenting sexually, they know facts but have no context to put them in, they are barely self aware. These are all symptoms of a loss of meaning in life, though Percy never puts it that directly. He described a culture losing its way.
The results vary. Listlessness in most. Sexual aberration in a few (described explicitly at points – not for young people). But the Thanatos Syndrome is a sort of spiritual death that has afflicted us, for which the chemical being secretly injected into the populace is just a metaphor.
One interesting feature of the book is that the main character slowly figures out he’s being bribed, then the conspiracy behind it, then the chemicals-in-the-water element, and finally the pedophilia ring. At each point of escalation, he remains perfectly calm and says little. “I see” is the most common thing he says, when he understands and rejects what he sees. This is contrasted with “Yes” when he agrees on a course of action with his few allies. He is emotionally flat. The total absence of any shock registered is itself shocking. The reader can interpret that positively: it’s important for us to see and to act courageously in the face of evil, which he does. And particular emotions are not essential to doing that. Or is it negative? Has the psychiatrist been desensitized to the nihilism surrounding him? Perhaps to a degree. If we aren’t shocked and angered by what we read here, there’s something wrong with us. But the planned, concrete action he takes to stop the evil wins the day.
I’ve heard Percy is a devout Catholic, and this would fit with part of the message of the book. Embedded in the plot is a Catholic home for the disabled and elderly that is shut down by the sinister forces. They argue for euthanasia for the infirm, elderly, and for infants with disease or without fit parents to raise them. Sound familiar? Percy makes the case for the church caring for them instead. This is a profoundly pro-life book, at its core.
It’s a tough read for today’s evangelical, though. It stretches our categories, and depicts the trajectory of evil explicitly. But it also touches on important themes: our desire for normalcy, reputation, money and popularity can distort our moral compass. Wisdom for the world can be found in a church that looks to us crazy and detached from the world. There really are sinister, anti-life forces out there, and they’ll seek to recruit you.
3.5 stars, out of 5.
Percy also channels Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, exposing the nihilism that was hitting the main populace in the 80s, ironically amidst great material prosperity. The main character is a psychiatrist who sees it in patients he’s known for a long time. People are reaching out and experimenting sexually, they know facts but have no context to put them in, they are barely self aware. These are all symptoms of a loss of meaning in life, though Percy never puts it that directly. He described a culture losing its way.
The results vary. Listlessness in most. Sexual aberration in a few (described explicitly at points – not for young people). But the Thanatos Syndrome is a sort of spiritual death that has afflicted us, for which the chemical being secretly injected into the populace is just a metaphor.
One interesting feature of the book is that the main character slowly figures out he’s being bribed, then the conspiracy behind it, then the chemicals-in-the-water element, and finally the pedophilia ring. At each point of escalation, he remains perfectly calm and says little. “I see” is the most common thing he says, when he understands and rejects what he sees. This is contrasted with “Yes” when he agrees on a course of action with his few allies. He is emotionally flat. The total absence of any shock registered is itself shocking. The reader can interpret that positively: it’s important for us to see and to act courageously in the face of evil, which he does. And particular emotions are not essential to doing that. Or is it negative? Has the psychiatrist been desensitized to the nihilism surrounding him? Perhaps to a degree. If we aren’t shocked and angered by what we read here, there’s something wrong with us. But the planned, concrete action he takes to stop the evil wins the day.
I’ve heard Percy is a devout Catholic, and this would fit with part of the message of the book. Embedded in the plot is a Catholic home for the disabled and elderly that is shut down by the sinister forces. They argue for euthanasia for the infirm, elderly, and for infants with disease or without fit parents to raise them. Sound familiar? Percy makes the case for the church caring for them instead. This is a profoundly pro-life book, at its core.
It’s a tough read for today’s evangelical, though. It stretches our categories, and depicts the trajectory of evil explicitly. But it also touches on important themes: our desire for normalcy, reputation, money and popularity can distort our moral compass. Wisdom for the world can be found in a church that looks to us crazy and detached from the world. There really are sinister, anti-life forces out there, and they’ll seek to recruit you.
3.5 stars, out of 5.
November 11, 2021
A psychiatrist who just came out of prison (for selling drugs to truck drivers) notices strange behaviour with his patients. They seem more intelligent but also tend to use simplified language, and they will answer odd questions like what is the capital of x instead of requiring to know why the question was asked. His wife suddenly becomes a top Bridge player.
It turns out some evil guys have put "heavy sodium" into the drinking water system. With the intended result to better the people. No more child pregnancies, no Aids, no more violence. Etc.
And you can ask yourself the question. If that were really possible should they do it? They did the same thing with putting fluorides into the system to make your teeth better. Without asking you and without any legal background (have not checked this, if true that alone would be highly questionable.)
I was not entirely happy with the fact that the people responsible had to be child abusers in addition. Also, when the story came to an end, the author felt he had to add an additional fifty pages for example about the most guilty guy, who was forced to drink the water and thus lost his humanity, and who would mate an ape and learning sign-language to communicate. In itself not uninteresting but it felt like something not belonging to the book.
I am not sure if the author intended to write a thriller. If so, he did not succeed. The action is bad.
The best part is a subplot about a Catholic priest who confesses having had sympathies with a friend who had joined the SS. A book that should have been magnificent, but unfortunately is not.
It turns out some evil guys have put "heavy sodium" into the drinking water system. With the intended result to better the people. No more child pregnancies, no Aids, no more violence. Etc.
And you can ask yourself the question. If that were really possible should they do it? They did the same thing with putting fluorides into the system to make your teeth better. Without asking you and without any legal background (have not checked this, if true that alone would be highly questionable.)
I was not entirely happy with the fact that the people responsible had to be child abusers in addition. Also, when the story came to an end, the author felt he had to add an additional fifty pages for example about the most guilty guy, who was forced to drink the water and thus lost his humanity, and who would mate an ape and learning sign-language to communicate. In itself not uninteresting but it felt like something not belonging to the book.
I am not sure if the author intended to write a thriller. If so, he did not succeed. The action is bad.
The best part is a subplot about a Catholic priest who confesses having had sympathies with a friend who had joined the SS. A book that should have been magnificent, but unfortunately is not.
October 19, 2021
A difficult read due to the material. Tom discovers a conspiracy in which scientists are dumping chemicals into the water supply that effects the people's thought processes and sexual desire. A school is being run using this chemical to commit child sexual abuse.
Tom is a Catholic who doesn't know what he believes anymore. He's stopped practicing his faith, yet the morals instilled in him through it still direct his actions. The scientists doing these things frequently would mention that they and Tom want the same things and that he can't find a way to object to what they are doing. In a truly atheistic society, these would be considered good. We are approaching a highly scientific culture who's main goal is the progress of Western ideals. If individuals must suffer for the progess of the whole, then so be it. It reminded me of the scientific community that Lewis and Chesterton spoke against during their time.
I also liked how the perpetrators refuse to take the chemicals themselves. To the point that they don't even know if the chemicals will have any kind of long term side effects.
Tom is a Catholic who doesn't know what he believes anymore. He's stopped practicing his faith, yet the morals instilled in him through it still direct his actions. The scientists doing these things frequently would mention that they and Tom want the same things and that he can't find a way to object to what they are doing. In a truly atheistic society, these would be considered good. We are approaching a highly scientific culture who's main goal is the progress of Western ideals. If individuals must suffer for the progess of the whole, then so be it. It reminded me of the scientific community that Lewis and Chesterton spoke against during their time.
I also liked how the perpetrators refuse to take the chemicals themselves. To the point that they don't even know if the chemicals will have any kind of long term side effects.
May 23, 2017
Percy managed to craft something quite different from his other novels--this has more of the feel of a suspense novel than his other writing. Dr More takes on the role of a kind of psychiatric detective. The dialogue is terse and sometimes runs for pages without the philosophical asides I found so characteristic of the Moviegoer or Love in the Ruins. It is also far more bleak; much like Father Smith's insistence that "tenderness leads to the gas chamber," Percy makes an analagous point about the sexual revolution: free love leads inexorably to child porn. In fact, this novel strikes me as a convincing prelude to the pornification of twenty-first century media and culture, in which far-eyed dislocated selves speaking in sentence fragments "present rearward" and knuckle their way up balustrades, pongid-like, Snickers bar in hand.
I can't say I enjoy having much of the imagery of this novel in my head. As Alan Jacobs has noted, perhaps this sardonic, foul-mouthed, bourbon-drinking visionary is the one we both need and deserve.
I can't say I enjoy having much of the imagery of this novel in my head. As Alan Jacobs has noted, perhaps this sardonic, foul-mouthed, bourbon-drinking visionary is the one we both need and deserve.
May 8, 2021
This was my first Walker Percy, and it was plenty good enough to make me want to read more. A blurb, by Douglas Bauer, on the back of the paperback version that I have says, "There is ample evidence of Percy's brilliance in The Thanatos Syndrome--the droll Dixie anthropology, the pitch-perfect dialogue, the sheer intelligence everywhere on the page. . . . It is splendidly, uproariously Catholic, as well." I essentially can't improve on that too much. Each of those elements mentioned are there in abundance, all of which had me tear through this book very quickly. But ultimately the child abuse was too much, and really, I think, unnecessary for Percy to make his point.
His point, ultimately, I completely agree with. The book essentially is an argument for humanity, as God has created us. It, therefore, belongs on the same shelf as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or the wide range of non-fiction literature arguing against the abuses of the Nazis and the Communists to "improve" society and humanity.
As I finished the book, I started to kind of think of the book as a morality play. I think it works pretty well that way, with many characters who are almost too much of themselves or over-exaggerated on purpose. If you read it that way, it's easier to take in some of its more brutal elements because you don't think of the victims as real people (even though of course you know they aren't because it's fiction).
One footnote to my review is that I called the Simeon Stylite reference before he explained it overtly near the end of the book. I got to visit the remains of his pillar in Syria when I was there in 2005, so it was pretty easy for me to spot with the priest up in his fire tower.
His point, ultimately, I completely agree with. The book essentially is an argument for humanity, as God has created us. It, therefore, belongs on the same shelf as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or the wide range of non-fiction literature arguing against the abuses of the Nazis and the Communists to "improve" society and humanity.
As I finished the book, I started to kind of think of the book as a morality play. I think it works pretty well that way, with many characters who are almost too much of themselves or over-exaggerated on purpose. If you read it that way, it's easier to take in some of its more brutal elements because you don't think of the victims as real people (even though of course you know they aren't because it's fiction).
One footnote to my review is that I called the Simeon Stylite reference before he explained it overtly near the end of the book. I got to visit the remains of his pillar in Syria when I was there in 2005, so it was pretty easy for me to spot with the priest up in his fire tower.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 29, 2022
I can't actually remember if I finished this book or started it and was put off by the weirdness of it and DNF'd. That it was still on my 'Currently Reading' shelf over 6 months after I put it there leads me to believe the latter is true, though I packed up my books and moved during that time and haven't seen this one come out of the boxes yet. I do remember it was rather preachy and rambling, not the sci-fi/medical thriller I was expecting. Perhaps I'll have to borrow it from the library if I can't find my copy again, see if it jogs any more memories.
February 23, 2024
Walker Percy is pretty amazing, and this is a strange and amazing book. It’s a philosophical thriller that delivers extended commentary on social engineering and the culture of death.
His descriptions of rural Louisiana, Baton Rouge, bureaucrats, not-rural Louisiana, doctors, humans, religion, and religious people are subtle and not subtle, but generally spot-on and entertaining.
Warning: Part of the story involves child abuse and is somewhat disturbing.
His descriptions of rural Louisiana, Baton Rouge, bureaucrats, not-rural Louisiana, doctors, humans, religion, and religious people are subtle and not subtle, but generally spot-on and entertaining.
Warning: Part of the story involves child abuse and is somewhat disturbing.
Read
July 15, 2019I have so many mixed feelings about Walker Percy. I love his ideas and have enjoyed his nonfiction. But when I read his fiction I just can't get into it. There isn't that much difference between reading his novels vs reading his essays. His characters strike me as rather bland, and are a bit too prone to revealing the plot and thematic elements in unbelievable dialogue.
It's quite possible that I am revealing a deficiency in myself in saying I don't like Percy's fiction, but there it is.
It's quite possible that I am revealing a deficiency in myself in saying I don't like Percy's fiction, but there it is.
February 4, 2022
I hesitate to reread Percy novels thinking they are limited to only being good reads not great literature; but I truly enjoy laughing aloud and snickering as I read his stories. This one picked me up out the funk of postmodernity, even if it was just for a moment. I think I am more woke than I was before, if that is possible.
June 2, 2023
Reading this for an essay and it’s definitely one of the more rogue choices for me personally. It’s genuinely quite thought provoking but that might be because I have to read into it. A little umm ‘American written in the 80s’ for me but I was hooked throughout most of the novel
January 26, 2020
(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).
The story is better in this one but my focus was on trying to understand what Percy was deeper meaning.
The quotes below are from “Walker Percy: The Hopeful Dystopian” by Daniel Ritchie (Christianity Today 10-5-18): Percy’s writings are becoming classics because of his portrayals of how we are “Lost in the Cosmos”—the title of his satirical 1983 “self-help” book. Having exalted the autonomous individual, surrounded him with vast material wealth, and then freed him from the bonds of tradition and religious belief, writes Percy, we are somehow surprised that “man’s confidence in the place of the self in the Cosmos” has declined. Despite immense freedom of choice, his protagonists rarely know how to respond to the world. When faced with a question, they frequently shrug and answer, “All right.” What caused this alienation?
Percy believed that modern science had diminished reality to the interplay of two elements: cause and effect. Translating this reduction into language, communication is limited to arbitrary signals and responses. And psychology and medicine repeat the pattern by restricting human interaction to the two elements of stimulus and response. The existentialist writers who appealed to the young Walker Percy realized that these approaches to knowledge left the human person homeless in the world and alienated from the self. Any meaning must be self-created through our intense consciousness of life experience, they wrote.
Before the fictional physician Tom More begins his moral recovery in Love in the Ruins, he participates in the alienated “stimulus-response” pattern of modern medicine. He has invented a machine, the “ontological lapsometer,” which promises to eliminate alienation by readjusting one’s emotional state through electro-chemical adjustments of the brain. After the novel’s crisis, More ultimately accepts his own alienation as a permanent feature of his humanity and finds solace in a real relationship, namely marriage.
Having learned from his mistakes, More returns in Percy’s strongly plotted final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome(1987), in which the medical establishment has come to understand evil itself in cause-and-effect terms. Doctors deal with it clinically, justifying euthanasia, abortion, and the killing of infants up through 18 months, along with reducing human aggression by injecting chemicals into the water supply. In the moral center of the book, Father Simon Smith confesses his attraction to the passion, romanticism, and daring of an analogous mode of thought when he witnessed it among physicians in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. After talking with a doctor’s son, who plans to join Hilter’s SS as soon as possible, the priest admits, “If I had been German not American, I would have joined him.”
The Thanatos Syndrome shows an ever-deepening understanding of the symbolic significance of relationships. Ignoring that significance has demonic consequences, Percy believed, and they are fully displayed in that novel.
The first step toward humanity in many of Percy’s books is to recognize our own capacity for evil. It’s a darkly satirical lesson, but unlike so many of today’s dystopias, it is also hopeful. By recognizing their capacity for evil, characters like Tom More and the priest emerge from the cause-and-effect, stimulus-response model for humanity. Evil is a “third thing” that becomes meaningful only in the context of true human relationships—and so is the good. Good and evil can be named only in the context of symbolic language, which in turn implicates us in a moral universe. And meaning for Percy is most clearly illuminated in relation to the goodness of the Logos, the ultimate “third thing” in any relationship.
Don’t look for happy endings in Percy’s novels. But you may find that his horror and hilarity clarify many of today’s cultural confusions. And like other classic authors, he’ll clarify tomorrow’s confusions as well.
The quotes below are from “Walker Percy’s Appeal to Searchers: The Last Gentleman and the Second Coming” by Rich Gray (Christian Scholars Review):
Where Flannery O’Connor created grotesque characters and plots to arouse her “hostile” readers to reconsider their dismissal of Christianity, Percy created alienated characters groping for religious significance. What Percy got from O’Connor was a novelistic theory of the Christian author and non-Christian reader—how to create a literary world where grace operates on searching characters. O’Connor’s picture of readers as nearly deaf and blind impressed Percy as just the sort of audience he sought: unaware of Christianity’s power to respond to profound issues. (19)
Both O’Connor in “Novelist and Believer” and Percy in “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World” allude to Albert Camus (1913-1960), author of The Plague, The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus, and a religious skeptic who successfully incorporated philosophical searches in his novels. … Camus offered celebrated shoulders for Percy to stand on. Percy and O’Connor were glad that in the publishing world a tradition already existed which they could exploit. (19)
In numerous interviews and essays, Percy embraced O’Connor’s approach—a writer who creates a literary world where grace works to awaken characters to their spiritual predicament. Responding to the question, “Is it hard to be a Catholic and a novelist?” Percy replied, ‘I guess I’d go back to Flannery O’Connor. She was a militant Catholic. She said, “Everything I do or write is informed by my belief.” We talked about it. We said that being Catholic is an advantage. ... Christianity and the Catholic faith are congenial to the vocation of a novelist. ... Christianity and the novel are both predicamental. A novel is always about somebody in trouble or incomplete or unfulfilled and their flawed journey through life. ... In theological terms, man is fallen. His life is a journey.’ (19-20)
Percy joined O’Connor in seeing humanity as being theologically hard of hearing, lost, shipwrecked, distracted by commercial glitter, inauthentic, suicidal, and living in despair. The post-modern protagonist, thought Percy, suffered from a broken relationship with God. Thus O’Connor’s ideas continued to reinforce Percy throughout his career, long after she died in 1964. (20)
The theme of wandering fits Percy’s protagonists philosophically; they do not depart from civilization for solitary treks over forbidding deserts. Instead they feel alienated from the secular/consumer culture around them and seek religious meaning amidst a society that is deaf to religious questions. In none of Percy’s novels does a non-Christian character roam all the way to conversion; instead the main characters turn toward the Christian God, as if they would embrace him should the story continue. Percy’s main characters doubt secular concepts of humans as only physical, temporal, consuming beings; they realize that human life must have immortal consequence. (21)
Walker Percy’s two novels about Will Barrett, The Last Gentleman (1965) and The Second Coming (1980), reveal Percy’s indirect method of writing for non-believers. In the first novel, Will awakens to the possibility of a search for meaning in Christianity. In the second novel, an older Will searches for God throughout the story, finally coming to the point of commitment when the novel closes. Both novels are narrated by a comic, satiric third person, limited voice. In the first part of both novels, Will Barrett moves from dwellings of alienation, to odd habitations of searching, and arriving at homes of salvation. Also at the end of both novels, Will Barrett encounters priests, who reluctantly explain to Will the Christian Gospel. At the beginning of Percy’s second published novel, The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett lives in a “congenial cell” in the Manhattan YMCA in New York City. At the novel’s outset, the protagonist’s dwelling reveals his confusion. The playful narrator describes Will as a mentally unstable but likeable young man. Here are Will’s thoughts upon ending his years of psychoanalysis: “I shall engineer the future of my life according to the scientific principles and the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis.” Planning where to aim his life, seeking answers from a psychiatrist, and relying on human scholars to provide guidance constitute Will’s approach at living as the story begins. (21)
His mental problem begins to grow into a religious quest when, at a New York hospital, he meets the Vaught family, whose sixteen-year-old son Jamie is receiving treatment for leukemia. (22)
Typically, a Percy protagonist feels like a castaway from another land who comes to suspect orthodox Christianity as “news from across the seas.” Percy’s main character realizes his life is a charade, and he is “a stranger who is in the world but who is not at home in the world.” So the castaway becomes the prototypical Percy protagonist, searching for news from across the sea of mortal life. (22-23)
The genuine relationship that blooms between Will and Jamie reveals the vehicle—their dwelling—and trip as religious; the pilgrims are drawn toward God, not in their destination on the map, but in their approach toward Jamie’s death. (23)
Will asks hospital chaplain Father Boomer to baptize the dying Jaime at Val’s telephoned order. Father Boomer complies reluctantly, since the Vaught family is unknown to him, and Jaime’s strength has declined so far he cannot coherently answer the priest’s questions about his faith: “Do you accept the truth that God exists and that He made you and loves you and that He made the world so that you might enjoy its beauty and that He himself is your final end and happiness, that He loved you so much that He sent His only Son to die for you...? (25)
Percy believed that when one discovers one’s predicament, one can act authentically. Percy’s novels are propelled by that philosophical paradigm: emblems of grace nudging characters to come to themselves. Percy once insisted that faith, is not a leap into the absurd, it is an act ... which is a form of knowledge ... A knowledge that God exists and that man is created in His image. ... [Man] has this extraordinary capacity to know things, a certain freedom, and he can find himself in a predicament. ... Ordinary epistemology does not take account of news as a form of knowing. (26)
Should Will believe in Christianity? Where is Will likely to end up? The reader must conjecture: To suicide with Sutter? To submerse himself back in the consumer culture? Or to yield to Christ? The novel closes with enormous equivocation as to Will’s choice, as a skeptical reader might appreciate. (26)
Walker Percy believed he had a call from God to write novels that artistically engaged non-religious readers by creating a believable, fictional world in which the grace of God is evident amid a culture that ignores God. Fully realizing this readership would not want to be preached at, Percy still felt compelled to show the mass audience novelistically that Christian belief is necessary. Biographer Jay Tolson believes that “Percy’s art ... implies that the only way out of this deathtrap is the mysterious workings of grace.” Tolson sees that Percy’s novels corner characters with only one way out—faith in the biblical God. The novel ends with the protagonist considering that solitary option. … Percy’s Catholic Christian viewpoint gave him insight into what was wrong with the world and what could be done to fix it: craft novels aimed at arousing agnostic readers’ interest in life’s principal questions and in Christianity’s answers. With humor, satire, and emblematic settings and clergy, these novels picture a castaway combing the beach for clues as to where he came from and what his destiny is. A biblical source for Percy’s metaphor of the castaway is Christ’s parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. In six places in his writings, Percy used Christ’s phrase about the prodigal, “came to himself,” to describe a contemporary person who realizes life has become superficial and he must search for answers to life’s questions through a relationship with God, much like a shipwrecked survivor would search the beach for messages in bottles from across the sea. These are novels which our civilization needs to keep reading. (34)
The story is better in this one but my focus was on trying to understand what Percy was deeper meaning.
The quotes below are from “Walker Percy: The Hopeful Dystopian” by Daniel Ritchie (Christianity Today 10-5-18): Percy’s writings are becoming classics because of his portrayals of how we are “Lost in the Cosmos”—the title of his satirical 1983 “self-help” book. Having exalted the autonomous individual, surrounded him with vast material wealth, and then freed him from the bonds of tradition and religious belief, writes Percy, we are somehow surprised that “man’s confidence in the place of the self in the Cosmos” has declined. Despite immense freedom of choice, his protagonists rarely know how to respond to the world. When faced with a question, they frequently shrug and answer, “All right.” What caused this alienation?
Percy believed that modern science had diminished reality to the interplay of two elements: cause and effect. Translating this reduction into language, communication is limited to arbitrary signals and responses. And psychology and medicine repeat the pattern by restricting human interaction to the two elements of stimulus and response. The existentialist writers who appealed to the young Walker Percy realized that these approaches to knowledge left the human person homeless in the world and alienated from the self. Any meaning must be self-created through our intense consciousness of life experience, they wrote.
Before the fictional physician Tom More begins his moral recovery in Love in the Ruins, he participates in the alienated “stimulus-response” pattern of modern medicine. He has invented a machine, the “ontological lapsometer,” which promises to eliminate alienation by readjusting one’s emotional state through electro-chemical adjustments of the brain. After the novel’s crisis, More ultimately accepts his own alienation as a permanent feature of his humanity and finds solace in a real relationship, namely marriage.
Having learned from his mistakes, More returns in Percy’s strongly plotted final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome(1987), in which the medical establishment has come to understand evil itself in cause-and-effect terms. Doctors deal with it clinically, justifying euthanasia, abortion, and the killing of infants up through 18 months, along with reducing human aggression by injecting chemicals into the water supply. In the moral center of the book, Father Simon Smith confesses his attraction to the passion, romanticism, and daring of an analogous mode of thought when he witnessed it among physicians in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. After talking with a doctor’s son, who plans to join Hilter’s SS as soon as possible, the priest admits, “If I had been German not American, I would have joined him.”
The Thanatos Syndrome shows an ever-deepening understanding of the symbolic significance of relationships. Ignoring that significance has demonic consequences, Percy believed, and they are fully displayed in that novel.
The first step toward humanity in many of Percy’s books is to recognize our own capacity for evil. It’s a darkly satirical lesson, but unlike so many of today’s dystopias, it is also hopeful. By recognizing their capacity for evil, characters like Tom More and the priest emerge from the cause-and-effect, stimulus-response model for humanity. Evil is a “third thing” that becomes meaningful only in the context of true human relationships—and so is the good. Good and evil can be named only in the context of symbolic language, which in turn implicates us in a moral universe. And meaning for Percy is most clearly illuminated in relation to the goodness of the Logos, the ultimate “third thing” in any relationship.
Don’t look for happy endings in Percy’s novels. But you may find that his horror and hilarity clarify many of today’s cultural confusions. And like other classic authors, he’ll clarify tomorrow’s confusions as well.
The quotes below are from “Walker Percy’s Appeal to Searchers: The Last Gentleman and the Second Coming” by Rich Gray (Christian Scholars Review):
Where Flannery O’Connor created grotesque characters and plots to arouse her “hostile” readers to reconsider their dismissal of Christianity, Percy created alienated characters groping for religious significance. What Percy got from O’Connor was a novelistic theory of the Christian author and non-Christian reader—how to create a literary world where grace operates on searching characters. O’Connor’s picture of readers as nearly deaf and blind impressed Percy as just the sort of audience he sought: unaware of Christianity’s power to respond to profound issues. (19)
Both O’Connor in “Novelist and Believer” and Percy in “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World” allude to Albert Camus (1913-1960), author of The Plague, The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus, and a religious skeptic who successfully incorporated philosophical searches in his novels. … Camus offered celebrated shoulders for Percy to stand on. Percy and O’Connor were glad that in the publishing world a tradition already existed which they could exploit. (19)
In numerous interviews and essays, Percy embraced O’Connor’s approach—a writer who creates a literary world where grace works to awaken characters to their spiritual predicament. Responding to the question, “Is it hard to be a Catholic and a novelist?” Percy replied, ‘I guess I’d go back to Flannery O’Connor. She was a militant Catholic. She said, “Everything I do or write is informed by my belief.” We talked about it. We said that being Catholic is an advantage. ... Christianity and the Catholic faith are congenial to the vocation of a novelist. ... Christianity and the novel are both predicamental. A novel is always about somebody in trouble or incomplete or unfulfilled and their flawed journey through life. ... In theological terms, man is fallen. His life is a journey.’ (19-20)
Percy joined O’Connor in seeing humanity as being theologically hard of hearing, lost, shipwrecked, distracted by commercial glitter, inauthentic, suicidal, and living in despair. The post-modern protagonist, thought Percy, suffered from a broken relationship with God. Thus O’Connor’s ideas continued to reinforce Percy throughout his career, long after she died in 1964. (20)
The theme of wandering fits Percy’s protagonists philosophically; they do not depart from civilization for solitary treks over forbidding deserts. Instead they feel alienated from the secular/consumer culture around them and seek religious meaning amidst a society that is deaf to religious questions. In none of Percy’s novels does a non-Christian character roam all the way to conversion; instead the main characters turn toward the Christian God, as if they would embrace him should the story continue. Percy’s main characters doubt secular concepts of humans as only physical, temporal, consuming beings; they realize that human life must have immortal consequence. (21)
Walker Percy’s two novels about Will Barrett, The Last Gentleman (1965) and The Second Coming (1980), reveal Percy’s indirect method of writing for non-believers. In the first novel, Will awakens to the possibility of a search for meaning in Christianity. In the second novel, an older Will searches for God throughout the story, finally coming to the point of commitment when the novel closes. Both novels are narrated by a comic, satiric third person, limited voice. In the first part of both novels, Will Barrett moves from dwellings of alienation, to odd habitations of searching, and arriving at homes of salvation. Also at the end of both novels, Will Barrett encounters priests, who reluctantly explain to Will the Christian Gospel. At the beginning of Percy’s second published novel, The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett lives in a “congenial cell” in the Manhattan YMCA in New York City. At the novel’s outset, the protagonist’s dwelling reveals his confusion. The playful narrator describes Will as a mentally unstable but likeable young man. Here are Will’s thoughts upon ending his years of psychoanalysis: “I shall engineer the future of my life according to the scientific principles and the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis.” Planning where to aim his life, seeking answers from a psychiatrist, and relying on human scholars to provide guidance constitute Will’s approach at living as the story begins. (21)
His mental problem begins to grow into a religious quest when, at a New York hospital, he meets the Vaught family, whose sixteen-year-old son Jamie is receiving treatment for leukemia. (22)
Typically, a Percy protagonist feels like a castaway from another land who comes to suspect orthodox Christianity as “news from across the seas.” Percy’s main character realizes his life is a charade, and he is “a stranger who is in the world but who is not at home in the world.” So the castaway becomes the prototypical Percy protagonist, searching for news from across the sea of mortal life. (22-23)
The genuine relationship that blooms between Will and Jamie reveals the vehicle—their dwelling—and trip as religious; the pilgrims are drawn toward God, not in their destination on the map, but in their approach toward Jamie’s death. (23)
Will asks hospital chaplain Father Boomer to baptize the dying Jaime at Val’s telephoned order. Father Boomer complies reluctantly, since the Vaught family is unknown to him, and Jaime’s strength has declined so far he cannot coherently answer the priest’s questions about his faith: “Do you accept the truth that God exists and that He made you and loves you and that He made the world so that you might enjoy its beauty and that He himself is your final end and happiness, that He loved you so much that He sent His only Son to die for you...? (25)
Percy believed that when one discovers one’s predicament, one can act authentically. Percy’s novels are propelled by that philosophical paradigm: emblems of grace nudging characters to come to themselves. Percy once insisted that faith, is not a leap into the absurd, it is an act ... which is a form of knowledge ... A knowledge that God exists and that man is created in His image. ... [Man] has this extraordinary capacity to know things, a certain freedom, and he can find himself in a predicament. ... Ordinary epistemology does not take account of news as a form of knowing. (26)
Should Will believe in Christianity? Where is Will likely to end up? The reader must conjecture: To suicide with Sutter? To submerse himself back in the consumer culture? Or to yield to Christ? The novel closes with enormous equivocation as to Will’s choice, as a skeptical reader might appreciate. (26)
Walker Percy believed he had a call from God to write novels that artistically engaged non-religious readers by creating a believable, fictional world in which the grace of God is evident amid a culture that ignores God. Fully realizing this readership would not want to be preached at, Percy still felt compelled to show the mass audience novelistically that Christian belief is necessary. Biographer Jay Tolson believes that “Percy’s art ... implies that the only way out of this deathtrap is the mysterious workings of grace.” Tolson sees that Percy’s novels corner characters with only one way out—faith in the biblical God. The novel ends with the protagonist considering that solitary option. … Percy’s Catholic Christian viewpoint gave him insight into what was wrong with the world and what could be done to fix it: craft novels aimed at arousing agnostic readers’ interest in life’s principal questions and in Christianity’s answers. With humor, satire, and emblematic settings and clergy, these novels picture a castaway combing the beach for clues as to where he came from and what his destiny is. A biblical source for Percy’s metaphor of the castaway is Christ’s parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. In six places in his writings, Percy used Christ’s phrase about the prodigal, “came to himself,” to describe a contemporary person who realizes life has become superficial and he must search for answers to life’s questions through a relationship with God, much like a shipwrecked survivor would search the beach for messages in bottles from across the sea. These are novels which our civilization needs to keep reading. (34)
May 27, 2020
Meh. Either his point is too overt or belabored. Yes, the twentieth century has shown us the banality of evil. And the (Catholic) church is too weak to wack-a-mole it whenever tender-hearted maliciousness rears its head.
For a Percy novel, I was disappointed. Story was not that great and parts were gratuitous.
For a Percy novel, I was disappointed. Story was not that great and parts were gratuitous.
June 9, 2019
Quite a fun read. competent literary author attempting a “thriller” ... i think he may have used more ingredients for the stew than was necessary and a bit overkillish. but i like his writing and have read others by him
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