The Second Coming

...Will and Allie are building up human society over again, from scratch...

...In the eyes of the world, represented by Allie's mother, this is all shocking...

...Sometimes Will's thoughts make for difficult reading...

...Because of Allie's mental illness and the shock treatments forced upon her, she must relearn basic language skills...

...it is only when he recovers the memory of what his father had tried to do that he is free to act...

...Like all of Percy's novels, The Second Coming is a challenging work...

...Some of the structural difficulties of The Last Gentleman recur: Will's trip down and across the country there and his car and bus trip to Atlanta here — however much they symbolize the lot of homo viator — interfere with the forward progress of the book...

...The Second Coming continues the troubled life of Will Barrett...

...He meets Allison Hunnicutt Huger, the daughter of his old girlfriend, Kitty Vaught...

...Gerard Reedy as Will calls it, between the extremes of suicide and mindless living which American society habitually offers in Percy's novels...

...Percy cannot do everything in every novel...

...also, we get a humane explanation at last why so many Percy heroes prefer war to peace ("thinking of peace during war is better than peace...

...it explores and defines a "tertium quid," THE SECCND CQNUK Walker Percy Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $12.95, 360 pp...

...No redemption is offered to these many social and religious realities, as it is to Will and Allie...

...Will often speaks with his dead father in this novel...

...This is so even when the hero himself, as in Love in the Ruins, insists on a fully scientific, empirical view of the psyche...

...Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading himself behind this simple silly holy face?'' Read as a whole, the five novels present their own sign of contradiction...

...Will and Allie recapitulate, in their choice of words and tools, the history of culture...

...On the other hand, Percy integrates his philosophical interest in language more successfully here than he has been able to do before...

...for most of us, it is the interspersed social satire, thematically integrated or not, which relieves the strain of the ongoing personal drama...

...Percy's heroes invariably have to come to terms with the memory of their fathers...

...Will and Allie found their relationship on simplicity...

...God gives his "sign" in and through the comedy of the human body...

...the epilogue to Love in the Ruins (1971), in which Tom More enjoys a family Christmas...

...They build up a language together...

...the fleeting gesture of solidarity between Will Barrett and Sutter Vaught at the end of The Last Gentleman (1966...

...The Second Coming especially harkens back to and develops those scenes in Percy's previous work where authentic, human community occurs: a few conversations between Binx Boiling and Kate Cutrer in The Moviegoer (1961...

...if God exists, he will appear to save him from death by starvation...

...no such intuition bothers Will Barrett here...

...The major change The Second Coming rings on the previous novels lies in its greater exploration of the peaceful, romantic images that have always been present in Percy's work and are here amplified to challenge, if not drown out, the discord of twentieth-century America...

...To create a shelter Allie and the artisans Will later recruits use only the simplest tools and materials...

...Will alone appreciates that in her careful naming of things she makes more sense than the rest of the world...

...At the end of The Moviegoer, Binx Boiling has an inkling that God just might have something to do with organized religion...

...like other Percy heroes, Will is slightly mad, and, once again, it is occasionally difficult to see where the author's irony begins and ends...

...In The Second Coming, Will manages to remember what was hidden from us in The Last Gentleman: that his father attempted to kill his twelve-year-old son and himself several years before a secpnd attempt on his own life was successful...

...Commonweal: 472...

...in these imaginary conversations, his father tempts him, almost successfully, to suicide...

...he will not give it in response to abstract demands placed upon him — a human strategy called "angelism" in Love in the Ruins — and Will, in spite of himself, is saved...

...Percy's satirical targets here include: old-age homes, overeating, makers of pornographic films, born-again Christians, belief in reincarnation, a priest in a jump suit who feels "uneasy" talking about religion, ecumenism, astrology, and California, where "everyone believed everything," and which has apparently replaced Ohio as the object of Percy's special disfavor...

...in his religious development, Will progresses from the mentality of a cranky Old Testament prophet, who rejects the world, to a hesitant awareness, given to him only on the last page of the novel, of God's incarnational presence in the world...

...In Percy, salvation only occurs with the advent of the other, the right person, the friend or lover, whose subjectivity is eternally and irreducibly hostile to empirieal analysis...

...the reader who does not believe in the "simple silly holy" body — "holy" because God has been there — must be puzzled indeed by the way Percy rescues a few characters from the nonsense going on around them...

...and the mad-house visions of a peaceful life in the Shenandoah Valley of Lance Lamar in Lancelot (1977...

...Yet Percy's principals must always pass beyond the various clinical helps offered to them — in this novel, therapy, shock treatments, and pills — for living in the future...

...Will Barrett is now in his mid-fifties, a retired widower living in North Carolina, very wealthy, and still falling into the psychic gaps which had plagued his early years...

...Certain residual ambiguities in the characters of Will and Kitty and Sutter Vaught are nicely cleared up...

...It would appear from the end of the novel, though much is left unresolved, that Will, Allie, and the community they found will survive...

...However clinically ill the subjects who relate to one another may be, intersubjectivity is the purpose of their existence...

...Will initially seeks his' 'tertium quid'' by retreating to a cave to await a' 'sign" from God...

...Much has already been written about the relative merits of The Second Coming in the Percy canon.For me, the novel lacks the purity and simplicity of The Moviegoer and the richly theological development of Love in the Ruins...

...generally social misfits, like their sons, these fathers are often depressed individuals and sometimes suicidal...

...From the notebooks of Sutter Vaught in The Last Gentleman on into the present work, Walker Percy has been reluctant to understand his action and characters in anything less than a fully theological background...

...Allie has just escaped from the mental home in which her parents have placed her...

...Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver?," Will asks himself, about Allie, at the end...

...Allie's re-creation of the world through language is stunning in conception and execution...

...Books: GESTURES OF SOLIDARITY THOUGH Walker Percy has always been a critic of how twentiethcentury Americans live, and though The Second Coming, his fifth novel, continues this critique, this new work attempts in muck greater detail than before to accentuate the positive: to explore, with great imaginative joy, states in which human'beings may live together with authenticity...

...they court each other and make love...

...A toothache eventually drives Will from the cave and into Allie's arms...

...The Second Coming is complex enough as it stands and it is right for the author tacitly to let his novels comment on one another...

...This demand for empirical proof parallels, on the religious level, the scientific reductionism that recurs in the novels and that is a major theme of Percy's collected essays, The Message in the Bottle (1975...

...An unabashed, tendentious romantic, Percy also has the great ability to construct scenes, especially in this novel, where intersubjectivity becomes so real it hurts...

...Percy feels compelled at times to comment on current events like integration and Southern real estate dealing, as in these travel narratives, that do not fire his imagination...

...The reader of The Second Coming who expects rowdy social criticism will not be disappointed...

...Percy's use of 29 August 1980:471 psychiatric models of behavior is always interesting...

...Will's acts of remembering recall the structure of psychoanalysis...