The Ceremony of Innocence

...His death hovers over the book and eventually provides it with the baptismal ceremony that American fuzziness and "innocence" so tragically lacks...

...But Percy can write about America with amazing charm and adeptness...

...I am a sincere, humble, and even moral pornographer...

...He is open to experience and wonder but rather distraught and unanchored after several years among the "Yankees" and in the hands of a Jackson Heights psychoanalyst...

...I accept the current genital condition of all human relations and try to go beyond it...

...I say all this at the outset because I admire Percy's aims and talents very much and wonder why, with all that he has going for him, he comes off so poorly in his book...

...Much of the time he was like a man who has just crawled out of a bombed building...

...Like his hero, he is wide open to the possible, lackadaisically intent on letting his book and plot wander where it listeth...

...a spiritual voyage of discovery from New York to the deep South and then west to New Mexico, which in addition tries to discover a ceremonial significance in the welter of American life...

...I cultivate pornography in order to set it at naught...

...Now Percy, with all his gifts of observation and crisp utterance intact, has taken the difficult second step...

...The book never rids itself definitively of its original haphazardness...

...As he himself says, we are living in the age of embarrassment when all issues, from civil rights to the death of a young man, have become distant, ungraspable, clouded-the age "of unspendable rage...

...Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., we might become friends later...

...A shrike, the Negro's ghost bird, sat on a telephone wire and looked at him through its black mask...

...Except for the concern with alienation, this hero could have stepped from the more romantic pages of Faulkner's novels about the beleaguered Southern gentility...

...It also was distinguished by an awareness of the dislocation and formlessness of American life that escaped the perils of the familiar formula by an invincible gusto for Southern scenes and characters and an even more invincible pride in the hero's family history and tradition...

...In the old days his great grandfather "wore a holster like a Western hero and once met the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a barber shop and invited him then and there to shoot it out on the Street...

...Modern ideas that range from the Kierkegaard quoted in one of the novel's epigraphs to a tangential American version of the Christian concepts of the English poet and novelist, Charles Williams...

...He himself would like "to become a man and to know what to do-like an Apache youth who at the right time goes out into plains alone, dreams dreams, sees visions, returns and knows he is a man...

...Coincidence and confusion form the aegis under which evente take place and characters have their being...

...You cannot write a grand Dostoevskian novel with your tongue in your cheek...

...Scene by scene, character by character, Percy is writing with an instrument as sharp and clean as a surgeon's scalpel, but some almost constitutional embarrassment, some reticence that involves central issues, blurs the expansive pattern and creates a continual slight irritation in the reader, or at least in this reader...

...The land hummed and shimmered in its own rich darkness...

...Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose...

...I may sniff like a dog but then I try to be human rather than masquerade as human and sniff like a dog...

...But no such time came and he still didn't know how to live...

...A "humidification" engineer working in the bowels of the earth under Macy's, he emerges one fine day to buy a costly telescope, quit analysis and his job, and fare forth in search of his own and his nation's identity...

...Bugs zoomed and splashed amber against the windshield...

...But then "his family turned ironical and lost its gift for action...

...Sutter, the intellectual son who refuses to knuckle under to the accepted forms of social hypocrisy, keeps a journal that sounds like Simone Weil rewritten by Susan Sontag, if one can imagine such an hilarious hybrid...

...He hates his ideas and refuses to give them their true imaginative weight...

...Unfortunately, the result is an unformed and slightly boring confusion, which only now and then perks up in a bravura scene of modulated and ironic comedy...

...In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations...

...His own father "was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor...

...But I am not a pornographer...

...Unluckily, some of this embarrassment and "unspendable rage" have crept into Percy's own treatment and style-a persistent, echoing irony that is ingrained in all of the proceedings like a faint watermark in fine paper...

...But he had far from a firm foothold, and the novel ends on a bleak, disheartened note...

...Seeing things afresh, of course, is an honorable trade in American letters and there is a lot in Percy that reminds one of such excellent forbears as Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway...

...His fits are moments of déjà vu when "there came over him as it might come over a sorrowful old man the strongest sense that it had all happened before and that something else was going to happen and when it did he would know the secret of his own life...

...Picking was still going on, great $25,000 McCormicks and Farmalls browsing up and down the cotton rows...

...His romance, however, revolved around the movies, whose clarity and fixity gave him a foothold to withstand the drab, dissolving flux of everyday life...

...Too faint...

...Loneliness, wonder and innocence are his themes too...

...Part of the trouble may be the very loftiness of his ambition: He is trying to find in our ordinary confused world-in its problems, its people, its landscapes-material for a Dostoevskian novel of the soul's most buried and burning problems...

...It was a surprising book, full of shrewd, country-style observation and tense, ironic writing...

...But a complication has been introduced: ideas...

...Once again the hero is a man on the outside, a watcher on the alert for signs of power and purity...

...Here is the South as seen by the returned hero: "Dead trees shrouded in kudzu vines reared up like old women...

...He suffers from amnesia, anxiety fugues, and a persistent feeling of not meshing in with the jolly, untroubled groups around him...

...Here is a sample from it: "The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal...

...Indeed, it was the movies' "peculiar reality" that kept him alive, affording him a sense of ritual in a society bereft of ritual and meaning...

...The last is more important than the first, however, and the curve of Percy's plot really leads us, through its shy meanderings and oblique conversations, to the wholly Charles Williams idea that we can only find our own reality by shouldering the burden of other people's torments, that our sufferings are not our own, that we are part of each other...

...Combine this with a satiric flair, a sense of the contemporary that seems to ache in him, and an unerring eye for the characteristic gesture or tone, and Walker Percy, with all of his faults, becomes one of America's most interesting writers...

...He is also suffering from family tradition gone to seed...

...This is parody, certainly, though rather uncertain parody, since Percy takes Sutter seriously but not his ideas...

...The hero, who has been hired as companion for the dying boy, engages in a distant dialogue with Sutter through the agency of this journal...

...And, in a strange, glancing, cryptic fashion, at times it partly succeeds...

...To arrive at this point Percy takes us for a trip not only through an America seen with hallucinating, high-powered telescope sharpness but also through a family, a representative Southern family which includes the cast of contemporary anguish au grand complet: a foxy, genial, millionaire father who owns "the second largest Chevrolet agency in the world," a fussy mother who plays bridge and worries about the perils of fluoridation, a decisive daughter who becomes a Catholic and a nun, a son who gives up a promising career as a doctor to explore the "transcendence" of sex, and another son who is dying of leukemia...

...Or at least that seems to be the gist of the matter...

...His hero is a present-day Prince Myshkin, just as naive and questioning and just as absurd and annoying...

...Down and out at last and onto the vast prodigal plain of the Delta, stretching away misty and fecund into the October haze...

...He is wondrously sensitive to the infinite nuances of landscapes and peoples, he has a great ear for tangy Southern talk, a sensitivity to the changes in atmosphere and environment that at times is preternaturally revealing...

...Despite this novel, with its longeurs and blunderings, he remains just that...

...Things seemed to turn white and dense and time itself became frightened with an unspeakable emotion...

...His new novel, The Last Gentleman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 409 pp., $5.95), is a looser, more wide-ranging book...

...This is also an advantage, though, for "like the sole survivor of a bombed building, he had no secondhand opinions and he could see things afresh...

...Percy can be very detailed and precise about everything he sees or thinks or imagines, yet there is a standoffish wariness about committing himself to his novel's larger design...

...It was a heedless prodigal land, the ditches rank and befouled, weeds growing through the junk " Anyone who can write like that, so brilliantly aware of the inner meaning of landscape and region, is equipped, of course, with a common American gift that has been magnified into something uncommon...