Reading, Writing, Thinking

What is it with Walker Percy? I get so much pleasure from reading his books -- I've just finished Lancelot and have read Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming -- but I come away from them vaguely dissatisfied.

Part of the problem, of course, is the strong theistic, even Christian, tenor of much of his concerns. As time goes on, I have less and less sympathy for these themes in fiction. Even Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory galled me somewhat, and a lot of people consider that a masterpiece.

But there's a lot more going on in Percy's fiction than people dealing with faith. In Lancelot it's a minor theme at most, at least on a surface reading. (Of course the novel is about redemption, but not in conventional religious terms, even though the book takes the form of a confession to a priest. And there's a sense in which he isn't redeemed, because he gets away with murder at the end.) I wouldn't go so far as to say that his people are real, but they are believable without being realistic. His main characters are exaggerated for comic and dramatic effect, yet they are still sensibly human. Even when I lose sympathy with them for their religiosity, I enjoy their company.

Living in the South may have something to do with this. As a transplanted Yankee, I appreciate the way Percy plays with Southern stereotypes (although I suppose native Southerners appreciate it, too), exploring their truths and falsehoods, strengths and weaknesses. He examines the relationships between various stereotypes as they play out between humans, without forgetting that they are humans, and that real human characteristics have contributed to the construction of the stereotypes. And if the characters' problems are not strictly realistic, Percy has earned our indulgence by giving us living stereotypes.

So there is, as I said, great pleasure in the reading. It's the endings that leave me cold. The Second Coming managed all right, resolving questions of faith and love and survival with gentle humor and the promise of a new start. Love in the Ruins, on the other hand, plays with science fictional tropes and builds up to what is supposed to be an apocalypse, but the disaster fizzles out. This works within the definitions of the main character and his story, but it leaves the reader with unfulfilled expectations. The world is changed at the end, and the hero is transformed through love, but none of the transformations have come about through the cataclysm that the whole book leads to. That proves to have been more or less an afterthought.

Likewise, in Lancelot, we expect some consequence when Lancelot finally gets around to describing how he murdered his wife, but there isn't any. He is released from the institution where he has been confined, apparently sane enough to function in the world. Yet from what he describes, he is guilty of murder and sane enough to stand trial. Yes, he is rejected by the other patient, with whom he has been having a fantasized romance, but otherwise he is a monster set loose on the world, preaching a repellent social doctrine (I don't know if Percy expected it to be sympathetic, but it certainly wasn't to me) and unrepentant over killing human beings.

I just hoped for more after all that charm.

dmh