Walker Percy's Sci-Fi Detour
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Walker Percy's Sci-Fi Detour_ Love in the Ruins By Walker Percy Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 403 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell THERE IS a discouraging trend in recent American...
...G. K. Chesterton and Graham Greene have been successful with mystery and spy stories...
...His second, The Last Gentleman, more ambitious in scope, dealt with many of the same motifs: a neurotic hero from an old Southern family plagued by his self-detachment and his promiscuous girl-chasing...
...There are references throughout to Don Giovanni, to Yeats' "The Second Coming," and so forth...
...and a quest...
...It begins with the narrator finding himself in a wood—an echo of the first Canto of Dante's Inferno...
...the Dutch schismatics, "who believe in relevance but not God...
...Our hero marries the nurse, gives up womanizing, and goes to Mass again...
...In his previous books Percy showed a sure touch in integrating symbolism with action: Witness the mechanical frenzy of New Orleans Mar-di gras at the climax of The Moviegoer...
...The novel is set in the not-too-distant future, when vines have begun to sprout out of buildings, wolves have been seen in the streets of major American cities, and the United States seems to be falling apart...
...The dust jacket calls Love in the Ruins a comic novel, a loose term currently employed to cover a multitude of sins...
...The book is too long, too complex, too self-indulgent, and insufficiently coherent to be very funny...
...Love in the Ruins, in common with the Barth novel, is full of Everyman allegory and literary allusion...
...not unnaturally, they think him mad...
...Walker Percy has two fine novels to his credit, but he has taken a wrong turn with this one...
...The Catholic Church has split three ways: the American Catholics, who retain the Latin Mass, have a pope in Cicero, Illinois, and play "The Star Spangled Banner" at the elevation of the Host...
...In his pride, Dr...
...Speak of the devil," More exclaims, as the funding agent appears...
...More prays to his sainted ancestor, and the devil vanishes in a puff of smoke...
...Since the death of his daughter, he no longer attends Mass or keeps the commandments, has become an alcoholic, and is living in a ruined motel with three women—his nurse and two mistresses...
...More wants recognition from his colleagues for this invention...
...This allows him to diagnose two pathological conditions: "angelism," an abstraction from the environment resulting in terror and impotence, and "bestialism," an overadjustment to the environment causing lust and rage...
...The Moviegoer, won the 1962 National Book Award...
...A colleague's character is succinctly defined when he refers to girls as "popsies" and to More's sexual adventures as "affairs of the heart...
...At the end, More and the nurse make a home in some old slave quarters, and we have Uncle Tom's Cabin...
...So along comes the devil, claiming to represent a funding agency...
...C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers have written a species of science fiction...
...a young boy dying of a lingering illness...
...The answer to More's prayer to his progenitor is incredible, reminiscent of the phony miracles performed by Greene's Magdalene heroine in The End of the Affair...
...These themes reappear, with variations, in Percy's new novel, Love in the Ruins...
...I sincerely hope his next novel will make more constructive use of his considerable talents...
...And there is a hilarious scene in which a Southern Baptist and a Catholic quarrel over the doctrine of transubstantiation in the midst of a fire...
...He attaches a device to the lapsometer that can cure or exacerbate the disease, promises More the Nobel Prize, and foments a near-revolution on July Fourth with the new weapon...
...and "the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go...
...His mother conducts her business deals astrologically and has Rightist prophetic visions...
...In keeping with the book's science-Action form, the doctor has invented a device he calls "More's Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer," which measures the effects of high sodium- and high chloride-radiation on different parts of the brain...
...Like his ancestor, Tom More has remained faithful to Rome, though faithful in his own fashion...
...The narrator, a namesake and collateral descendant of Sir Thomas More, is a psychiatrist...
...Fortunately, More's chaste Presbyterian nurse offers herself to the agent in exchange for the return of her Faustus' bartered soul...
...There are occasional fine touches, as when More, returning from Mass with his daughter, cavorts like David dancing before the Ark...
...Of late this seems to be epidemic, and I am sorry to add Walker Percy to the list of its victims...
...The Calvinist nurse's eyes are as "calm as Lake Geneva...
...Percy's attempt at satire and relevance (a sexual response clinic, a radical college professor who denounces the United States but stays on for the high academic salaries, the black militant leader who played professional football for Detroit) are better left to the newspaper columns of political humorists on their off days...
...The Faustian escapades may conjure up unhappy memories of John Barth's Giles Goal-Boy, or Thomas Berger's Vital Parts...
...Percy's fine first novel...
...But Percy is not a facile writer, and his talents do not run to this kind of suspense, nor does he have the Joycean gift for language that Anthony Burgess used so successfully in the futuristic world of A Clockwork Orange...
...For some reason, subliterary forms have often attracted Christian novelists...
...Here, however, the machinery is made painfully obvious...
...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell THERE IS a discouraging trend in recent American fiction, a sort of artistic breakdown on the part of certain authors who, after several successful books, write a bad one in which the controlled themes of their earlier novels degenerate into selfindulgent preoccupations...
...Like other writers today, he has called for new literary forms, yet science fiction (or pornography, or mysteries, or comics) is neither new nor literary...
...Hence the name "lapsometer...
...Liberals and conservatives have polarized and a black revolutionary group called the Bantu is preparing to take over...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 10
