(novel, 1980)
As a novelist who was also a believer, Walker Percy didn’t pull his punches. He believed that our modern civilization was in the death grip of despair—despair so deep that few even recognized it for what it was. Through his novels Percy challenges his readers to see the truth about themselves. He asks the same questions as the great existentialist philosophers and novelists, but his answers are very different. If you are looking for a feel-good celebration of faith, look elsewhere. But if you are trying to understand the underlying spiritual malady of our times, perhaps Percy’s books are as good a place as any to begin.
In The Second Coming, Percy revisits the main character of his earlier novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), and finds him now rich and successful but no less alienated and dissatisfied with his life than when he was a poor, wandering nomad. Will Barrett is a middle-aged lawyer who has retired early, settling into a life of socializing, golf, and mourning his recently deceased wife. The first clue that something is seriously wrong with him occurs on the golf course, where he blacks out and has flashbacks about his childhood. He becomes increasingly ill at ease and grows obsessed with the realization that he is living in a spiritually dead culture. This realization jump-starts a half-crazy search for meaning that ultimately becomes a search for God.
Barrett is looking for some sort of sign. He cannot find answers in the usual places, as he finds believers and nonbelievers equally obnoxious; neither honest about the true state of their selves, their souls, or the culture in which they live. Insistent on finding answers to the questions that haunt him, he concocts a “foolproof” plan to determine once and for all if God is real or just an illusion. The answer he gets—his sign—and the way he gets that answer are not at all what he expected, but make for enlightening and entertaining reading.
For Barrett, finding an answer to his questions is connected with finding love in the form of Allie, a brilliant young woman who just can’t cope with existence. As Percy tells it, she “got all As and flunked life.” Allie has been placed in a mental hospital and subjected to bouts of shock therapy, which damage her memory and render her unfit to get along in the world. When she finally decides to escape from the hospital, armed with a notebook in which she has written notes to guide herself, Allie begins the long process of reintegration, a virtual blank slate trying to figure out how to navigate in this harsh and confusing world. The intersection of the lives of these two deeply alienated souls suggests that it is only in love—for God and for another person—that we find real meaning in life.
A novel that tackles such existential issues could easily become dry and philosophical, but instead The Second Coming is wise, comic, and touching, even as it is cynical about much that passes for wisdom in this post-Christian age. Because Percy is a master at creating wonderfully quirky characters, he can draw readers into his characters’ plights and make them feel the struggles as their own. Perhaps that is because Percy’s protagonists are all dealing with the same issues with which he personally struggled, and to which he found some answers in the Christian faith.
Walker Percy was born in Alabama in 1916 and raised in a family that was virtual Southern nobility but had some skeletons in its closet. His grandfather had committed suicide, and his father, outwardly successful but inwardly torn, ended his own life when Percy was only thirteen years old by shooting himself in the attic of the family home. A few years later his mother died in a car accident that looked suspiciously like a suicide. Percy and his brothers went to live with a bachelor uncle, Will Percy, who provided them with much-needed stability and an excellent education. Uncle Will reinforced the stoic humanism that Percy had learned from his parents, and Percy settled into agnosticism.
As a young man, Percy became convinced that science held the needed answers to the basic human questions, and that the scientific method could be deployed to solve the world’s mysteries. He graduated with honors from the University of North Carolina with a degree in chemistry, and then studied medicine at Columbia University. Such was his brilliance that he found time to read novels voraciously even in the midst of his demanding medical studies. Following his time at Columbia he elected to do his residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where his primary duty was to perform autopsies on anonymous corpses discovered along skid row. Because he failed to take proper precautions, he contracted tuberculosis from bacilli still alive in one of the cadavers.
At that time the usual remedy for tuberculosis was extended rest in a peaceful, healthy environment, so Percy was sent to a sanatorium in upstate New York where he spent two years recovering from the illness. While his body healed, he read widely—existentialist philosophers (Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger), novelists (Tolstoy, Kafka, Mann, and Dostoyevsky), and at the urging of a fellow patient, theologians (Augustine, Aquinas, and Kierkegaard). It was particularly the mixture of existentialism and Christianity that he found in Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard that was to have the most lasting influence on him, and an essay by Kierkegaard entitled “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle” convinced him of the necessity of fully embracing the faith he had been exploring intellectually. As he wrote:
When I was thirty, I thought I had things pretty well figured out—or at least I believed that those things which were not already explained by science were in principle explainable. When I was forty, I thought that what was not explainable by science—and that turned out to be a lot—could be explained by bringing God into it.1
Upon his release Percy married, and along with his new wife he joined the Catholic church. From then on he would be unwavering in his defense of Christianity, though he also was not shy about poking fun at its hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies. Settling in Louisiana, Percy was able, due to an inheritance left him by his uncle Will, to focus on studying and writing. He penned articles about contemporary issues (such as racism in the South), meditations on the existential dilemma of humans in the twentieth century, and technical essays on the science of semiotics (the study of language and signs), which was a special interest.
He considered his first two attempts at writing a novel to be failures, and one of them he even consigned to the flames. But his third, The Moviegoer (1961), an entertaining exploration of the Kierkegaardian “stages of existence” through the eyes of Binx Bolling, a compulsive attender of films and a man spiritually adrift, won the prestigious National Book Award. His second, The Last Gentleman (1966), was a runner-up for the same award. He continued to write novels that were critically acclaimed, even by those who did not share his faith, for he was never heavy-handed in his storytelling. Love in the Ruins (1971) is a very funny apocalyptic send-up of the state of modern culture at a time in the not-too-distant future when wolves howl in the streets of Cleveland, buzzards circle New Orleans, and vines sprout in the cracks of broken-down interstates. In it he posits faith as the only source of sanity for a dying civilization. Lancelot (1977) is darker in tone, a bitter critique of the sorry state of modern ethics, and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) continues the theme of cultural collapse and the need for a renaissance of faith. All of them are brilliantly insightful, earthy, irreverent, extremely funny, and beautifully told, as is his quirky nonfiction masterpiece, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983), which deserves a larger audience than it has found. After Percy’s death from cancer in 1990, his various essays were published under the title Signposts in a Strange Land (1994).
One of his most interesting essays in Signposts in a Strange Land is called “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” and it provides a helpful key to what Percy was trying to do in his novels. As a trained physician, he learned how to diagnose the sickness of a patient, and in this essay he suggests that the novelist might be a diagnostician for the spiritual sickness of our modern world. “Something is indeed wrong, and one of the tasks of the serious novelist is, if not to isolate the bacillus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable.”2
The name he gives to the sickness of our culture is “death in life.”3 We go through the motions, he suggests, but we are not really happy or content. We are the walking dead. We are isolated, lonely, and alienated, and we don’t really know how to relate to one another. We are pilgrims and wayfarers wandering and adrift in a strange land. We are in a mess.
No other time has been more life-affirming in its pronouncements, self-fulfilling, creative, autonomous, and so on—and more death-dealing in its actions. It is the century of the love of death. I am not talking just about Verdun or the Holocaust or Dresden or Hiroshima. I am talking about a subtler form of death, a death in life, of people who seem to be living lives which are good by all sociological standards and yet who somehow seem more dead than alive.4
If you don’t know what he is talking about, perhaps you just aren’t paying attention.
Walker Percy was not one to offer easy answers to the complex task of trying to live an authentic human life. He was no more patient with simplistic religious answers than with simplistic scientific ones, but if we are willing to make the effort of searching, he believed that there was truth and life to be found. But it is hard to find. Part of the problem, he believed, was with the devaluation of our Christian vocabulary.
The old words, God, grace, sin, redemption . . . now tend to be either exhausted, worn slick as poker chips and signifying as little, or else are heard as the almost random noise of radio and TV preachers. The very word “Christian” is not good news to most readers.5
In the face of this, Percy provides a fresh and quirky vocabulary for the search as he helps us look honestly at the human predicament. He reminds us that we do not have to give in to the despair of our times or keep it at bay by a multitude of distractions. He invites us, instead, to be pilgrims in search of a better way. “The point is that, in a new age when things and people are devalued, when meanings break down, it lies within the province of the novelist to start the search afresh, like Robinson Crusoe on his island.”6 And when we seek, perhaps, like Percy, we will find.