The Second Coming

...ness was clear even in his first novel, The Moviegoer...

...The two of them work fine together, Allie says, because he tends to fall down, and she--proud of herself for installing an antique, two-ton stove in her woodland home with pulleys and ropes--is a "hoister...

...his depictions of particular human dilemmas, though ably described, remain impenetrable...

...And all of them subscribe to one of Jonathan Swift's most treasured beliefs: that "when a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him...

...C r i t i c s like to refer to Walker Percy as a novelist of ideas, one who incorporates weighty philosophical notions in the substance of his work...

...Five novels and one book of essays after The Moviegoer he is no closer to unraveling his "mystery...

...You look," says a fastidious French Quarter resident, "like Charles Laughton in drag as the Queen of the G y p s i e s . " ) His cart a t t r a c t s a local smut p e d d l e r , who rents the bun compartment as a cache for pornographic photos, one of which turns out to be a picture of Ignatius's dream girl...

...Allie is an innocent, a tabula rasa, and through her eyes we are meant to see how silly and artificial our sane world is...

...Allie, you see, is too good for a world full of people who offer salutations in something less than complete sincerity and who make crude sexual overtures (heavens...

...The kind of facile theorizing that leads him to romanticize insanity prevents him from undertaking the grimmer business of" looking for the truth behind the cultural cliche...

...The u n i v e r s e , of c o u r s e , " Ignatius writes in his journal, " i s based upon the principle of the circle within the circle...

...F10A, 163-09 Depot, Flushing NY 11358 mal" attacks, Barrett develops a terrible slice...

...One wonders in this instance how mean ingful any novel can be in which tht basic philosophy is informed by a re...

...Why, for instance, does Binx only come alive in a car accident and Will Barrett only feel truly himself when being shot at...

...EVA BRANN JEFFREY TULIS JOHN ZVESPER WALTER BERNS THOMAS B. SILVER LARRY P. ARNN CARNES LORD HARVEY FLAUMENHAFT The Conference is being sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc...

...You will have to read this one for yourself, as a combined act of pleasure--and penance...

...Percy's description of this horrific affair would almost in itself justify his reputation as one of our best novelists, although the scene's power is diluted and its meaning betrayed when we come to see that its primary purpose is to lead Allie and Will to their love duet in the Holiday Inn...

...The information specialists at Phillips Peboleum will help you...

...For further information, contact: Glen E. Thurow, Department of Politics, University of Dallas, Irving, TX 75061 (214) 438-1123, ext...

...Toole's sympathy and affection for these misfits shine through the disa s t e r s he heaps on them...

...One day, while chasing a ball out of bounds, he meets Allie, an escapee from the local sanitorium...

...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 And so, not surprisingly, when Allie speaks to Barrett in a personal dialect of her own invention just this side of baby-talk, he can undersmd her, although no one else does...

...Was it such discouragement over his own failed efforts to get his novel published that drove Toole to suicide...

...gressive desire for life before toilet training...

...Duk, who has almost destroyed her memory with repeated shock treatments...

...For Walker Percy this idea is something of an artistic conceit...

...Again, as in The Moviegoer, our hero takes upon himself the detailed organization of his girl's everyday existence...

...His language theory, though presented in lucid, straightforward prose (no small accomplishment), remains prohibitively abstract...

...She is running away from her predatory parents, who are trying to steal her rightful inheritance, and from the s a n i t o r i u m ' s well-meaning but incompetent Dr...

...At the moment, I am in an inner circle...

...Dept...

...Percy, it becomes clear, has forsaken psychological insight for philosophical theories that, while fascinating in themselves, block the way toward a true understanding of human action and affairs...

...Their decision to marry means that Binx will, in essence, be holding her hand through the r e s t of her life...

...Along with these "petitJoshua Gilder is Associate Editor of Saturday Review...

...His discussion of the "debased coinage" of metaphor in one of his essays on language, for example, is one of the most insightful critiques of contemporary poetry written...

...And yet, because critics must cower before so august an idea as Language Theory and quite rightly feel themselves out of their depth, no one seems to have noticed that Percy never makes good on the original promise of The Message in the Bottle, expressed in the subtitle as "How Queer Man Is,' How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with The Other...

...We shall never know, but something else is certain: how much we've lost now that he lies where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his breast...

...And as to the general body of his work, it should be said that Percy is at his weakest as novelist/ philosopher (and not in substance very far removed from the French existentialists he amusingly derides in his collection of essays, The Message in the Bottle) and is at his strongest when he separates these two functions...

...Novelists of ideas are hardly above reproach, especially when they are lesser novelists for being so...

...He does quite well with the first two...

...the Willmoore Kendall Program in Politics and Literature of the Institute of Philosophic Studies, University of Dallas The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship The public is invited to attend, no registration required...

...Since a childhood trauma, which in the course of the novel he begins to relive and remember fully for the f i r s t time, Barrett's life has been, in a sense, p a r e n t h e t i c a l . His flight in early manhood up North and into the arms of a rich but plain wife, it turns out, was an attempt to escape the encumbrances of his past: the South, failure, a family suicide...

...While sitting on a park bench, for instance, she notices the "ironies" of contemporary life: the ridiculous changes in fashion, all new to her after her lengthy incarceration...

...Nevertheless, Kate's childishness is supposed to make her appealing: We are undoubtedly to see in her another, if slightly jaundiced, version of the helpless woman-child saved by the manly hero...

...Bill Adams (918) 661-5224 Dick Robinson (918) 661-5204 Jere Smith (918) 661-4982 Brooks Garner (918) 661-4987 Dan Harrison (918) 661-4974 Susan Stoffle (918) 661-5946 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 35...

...Finally, in 1976, she got it to Walker Percy, who agreed with her...

...One begins to feel, setting his novels alongside the essays of The Message in the Bottle, that although Percy has much that is interesting to say about language, and much that is interesting to say about human experience, he will never tie the two together...

...Along with the others, he must turn the wheels of a terrifically complex but always logical plot...

...Like a little child, Allie must be told where to go and what to ask for when she gets there...

...Percy develops the plot of his new novel, The Second Coming, along the same lines...

...As a philosopher, too, Percy has moments of brilliance...

...the jogger who sits next to her and talks nice but seems to have ulterior motives...

...But never, it seems, do they stop to consider the quality of these ideas...

...SAVE YOUR GASI BEAT INFLATIONI Roam the world 1st class by freighter or cruise ship at savings of at least 50...

...Conversely, only she can truly appreciate his alternating disaffection and chemically imbalanced visionary states...

...Equally good is the passage in which Barrett finally remembers his childhood trauma, when his father tried to kill himself and his son...

...This leads him to the Night of Joy night club, where Burma Jones advertises the extremely dubious floor show and Patrolman Mancuso is set to close in and . . . . I give up...

...Toole displays the manic inventiveness of Mordecai Richler or Stanley Elkin together with the love for order and geometry beloved of his protagonist...

...Since The Moviegoer, Percy has been jabbing over and over at this "mystery," sometimes expressed as the mystery of language, sometimes as the perversity of human beings...

...RHETORIC AND AMERICAN STATESMANSHIP A Conference on "Rhetoric and American Statesmanship" will be held at the University of Dallas October 16-18, 1980 hosted by the Department of Politics Speakers will include: FORREST McDONALD HARVEY C. MANSFIELD, JR...

...the policeman who tells her to "Have a nice day" but doesn't seem to mean it...

...the third part of this relatively tall order, however, is never fulfilled, and it remains the unanswered question in his fiction as well...

...There are some remarkably skillful characterizations in The Second Coming that demonstrate Percy's gifts as a novelist, one of the most impressive being of the Reverend Jack Curl, who hounds Barrett throughout the novel to donate a few millions of his deceased wife's fortune to a "Love and Faith" community on which she had her heart set before her death...

...To save her from the anxiety of having to make choices, Binx, the narrator-hero, takes it upon himself to plan K a t e ' s day step by step, sending her on errands, telling her what route to take on the bus, which seat to sit in, whom to speak to and what to say...

...In an essential way Barrett, too, has never grown up...

...Percy's tendency to romanticize mental ill...

...One gets the impression that, like Peter Pan, she didn't like the world, so she decided never to grow up...

...I am forced to function in a century which I loathe," wails Ignatius, but he is not allowed to sit and feel sorry for himself...

...Call us...

...236- home (214) 255-0692 - - or Peter W. Schramm, Western Director, ISI, 219 N. Indian Hill Blvd., Suite 200, Claremont, CA 91711 (714) 621-4754 THE SECOND COMING Walker Percy / Farrar Straus & Giroux / 1;12.95 Joshua Gilder I t is surprising how many people, despite overwhelming evidence of the acute distress of the mentally ill, continue to believe in the "King of Hearts" vision of the blissfully insane...

...The money from Confederacy's royalties, paperback rights, and movie option will go to the mother of John Kennedy Toole, who killed himself in 1969 at age 32...

...The circles widen, g y r a t e , and blend dizzyingly, like the circles on those spiral-painted wind-up toys...

...The novel's heroine, Kate, cannot manage the most elementary of tasks and pressures of life, so she regresses to a state of infantilism...

...Not only is it fun to be crazy, the fairy tale goes, i t ' s virtuous as well: The insane have opted out of a debased world to lead the moral life of s a i n t s , uncompromised by the meanness and pettiness of everyday living...

...Their relationship is so cloyingly infantile, in fact, that its consummation at a Holiday Inn suggests nothing so much as the mating of three-year-olds...

...Critics do Percy no favor when they line up behind him, spaniel-like, slobbering their praise because they know he's a sure thing...

...Will B a r r e t t , a r e t i r e d lawyer and widower (who had married into great wealth), suffers not merely from the gently distressing anomie of his predecessor, Binx, but also from what turns out to be a rare synaptical dysfunction that causes him to fall down on the golf course and ruin his otherwise better-thanpar game...

...The book was published only as a result of her persistence in shoving at people the smeary carbon of what she insisted was a great novel...

...After being fired from Levy Pants, where he foments an ill-fated rebellion of the proletariat, Ignatius turns up as a hot-dog vendor, dressed in a pirate costume to attract the tourist trade...