The Second Coming

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

...Call us...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...Dept...

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...