by Walker Percy
(Farrar,Straus,Giroux: 1980), 360pp.
So, I’ve read my first Walker Percy novel! Here’s an author who takes his background as a devout Catholic and southerner, trained as a medical doctor, and combines it with his life experience of having lost both grandfather, father and mother to suicide, and weaves a story in quest of making sense of the nonsense of living in a crazy world.
Meet the two main characters: Will, a well-respected, well-to-do widower who finds himself depressed and increasingly suspect of the farcical nature of life as he sees it. The answer? Not suicide necessarily, for then one never finds the answers…and so he concocts a seemingly insane experiment to prove for himself once and for all whether God exists. The outcome surprises both Will and the reader.
In the process of pursuing his experiment, he meets Allison, a recent escapee from a mental institution, who has undergone too many shock treatments to remember much about how life works. She’s adept at reading facial expressions and stating the obvious but clueless when it comes to appropriate protocol in reacting to strangers. For instance, what is this expression: “Have a nice day.” Such a nice thing to say, so why is it said in such a perfunctory way like ‘goodbye’ ? Good question; she has many of these. She puzzles too over the meaning of “love”, having no better notion of it than that it ‘sounds like something dark and furry which makes a lowing sound.” (40)
This duo of characters give the author an unusual perspective from which to evaluate the meaning of life, language and relationships. With the perceptive diagnostic skill of a doctor and his own hard-earned life experience Percy Walker blazes a bizarre and sometimes humorous trail toward the best answers to life’s hardest questions. His is not a story of complex or gripping plot. It is even unbelievable in spots, but this is forgiveable in exchange for his expert handling of thought and conversation which so clearly mirror the reality of the human condition.
In fact within the story’s first handful of pages the reader is faced with the possibility that something might be wrong with life, not only with that of the depressed epileptic main character, but also with life as he knows it. Is it possible for a majority of people “to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears.”(4)
This is not just another mindless novel to pass the time of day, though it is very readable. There is much food for thought in its pages on such diverse themes as belief vs. unbelief, real love vs. ‘doing it’, evidences for the existence (or not) of God, sanity vs. insanity, and the quandary of needing relationship when people are so tough to get along with! And yes, there’s reference to the Second Coming of Christ, but this is only a fragment of the meaning in the book’s title. The title’s full significance is in fact more food for thought!
--LS
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A review would be incomplete without a sampling of quotes from THE SECOND COMING that give a taste of Walker Percy.
“If one person is depressed for every ninety-nine who are not or who say they are not, who is to say that the depressed person is right and the ninety-nine wrong, that they are deceiving themselves? Even if this were true, what good would it do to undeceive the ninety-nine who have diverted themselves with a busy round of work and play and so imagine themselves happy?” (5)
“Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.” (21)
Lewis [a golfing friend], to Will : “The trouble is you and I share something that sets us apart.”
--“What’s that?”
“We’re the once-born in a world of the twice-born. We have to make our way without Amazing Grace. It’s a lonely road but there are some advantages along the way. The company, when you find it, is better. And the view, though bleak, is bracing. You see things the way they are. In fact, don’t you feel sometimes like the one-eyed in the land of the blind?”
He frowned. Why was Lewis’s unbelief so unpleasant? It was no better than the Baptist’s belief.
If belief is shitty and unbelief is shitty, what does that leave?
No, Lewis was even more demented than the believers. Unbelieving Lewis read Dante for the structure. At least, believers were consistent. They might think Dante is a restaurant in Asheville but they don’t read Marx for structure.” (151)
“Two more problems:
One: How to live. How do you live? My life expectancy is approximately another fifty or sixty years. What to do?”
Two: Memory. It’s coming back…Speak memory. Why? Only because I have to know enough of where I’ve been to know which way I’m going.” (93)
“Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?” (132)
“Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane? And how is it that death, the nearness of death, can restore a missed life?....Why is it that without death one misses his life?” (124)
“…people notice very little indeed, ghost-ridden as they are by themselves.”(174)
“A mystery: If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it? And if the good news is true, why are its public proclaimers such ### and the proclamation itself such a weary used-up thing?”(189)
“As unacceptable as believers are, unbelievers are even worse, not because of the unacceptability of unbelief but because of the nature of the unbelievers themselves who in the profession and practice of their unbelief are even greater ### than the Christians.
“The present-day unbeliever is a greater ### than the present-day Christian because of the fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery, and fatheadedness of his unbelief. He is in fact an insane person. If God does in fact exist, the present-day unbeliever will no doubt be forgiven because of his manifest madness.” (189)
“Are people necessary? Without people there are no tunneling looks. Brooks don’t look and dogs look away. But late afternoon needs another person.
“What do I do if people are the problem? Can I live happily in a world without people? What if four o’clock comes and I need a person? What do you do if you can’t stand people yet need a person?” (239)
“Must one have a plan for the pursuit of happiness? If so, is there a place where one looks up what one is supposed to do or is there perhaps an agency which one consults?
Who says?
Who is doing the supposing?
Why not live alone if it is people who bother me? Why not live in a world of books and brooks but no looks?” (241)
“Death in the guise of belief is not going to prevail over me, for believers now believe anything and everything and do not love the truth, are in fact in despair of the truth, and that is death.
“Death in the guise of unbelief is not going to prevail over me, for unbelievers believe nothing, not because truth does not exist but because they have already chosen not to believe, and would not believe, cannot believe, even if the living truth stood before them, and that is death.” (273)
“Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver? Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simple silly holy face?” (360)
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And lastly, Walker Percy’s writing is perhaps best understood with reference to his own sense of calling as an author. Here are his own words:
“To the degree that a society has been overtaken by a sense of malaise rather than exuberance, by fragmentation rather than wholeness, the vocation of the artist, whether novelist, poet, playwright, filmmaker, can perhaps be said to come that much closer to that of the diagnostician rather than the artist's celebration of life in a triumphant age.
Something is indeed wrong, and one of the tasks of the serious novelist is, if not to isolate the bacullus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable. Not to overwork the comparison, the artist's work in such times is assuredly not that of the pathologist whose subject matter is a corpse and whose question is not "What is wrong?" but "What did the patient die of?" For I take it as going without saying that the entire enterprise of literature is like that of a physician undertaken in hope. Otherwise, why would be here? Why bother to read, write, teach, study, if the patient is already dead?––for, in this case, the patient is the culture itself.
[I]t is the primary business of literature an art . . . [to be] a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad, a celebration of the way things are when they are right and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong. The pleasures of literature, the emotional gratifiction of reader and writer, follow upon and are secondary to the knowing.”
["Diagnosing the Modern Malaise," in Walker Percy, Sign-Posts in a Strange Land 204-221, at 206,207 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1991)]
I hope you will dip in and try Walker Percy! Incidentally, the main character of The Second Coming(1980) is first featured in Percy’s book: The Last Gentleman(1966), which I have yet to read!
--LS
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