Lost Souls

...To explain his perception of displacement, Will constructs a theory having to do with the disappearance of the Jews from the South, a theory his friends view with increasingly concerned amusement as they continue to hope that he will return to his senses and to playing golf the way he once did...

...That is, us.'" " 'What about us?'" " 'Is there anything entailed?'" "Is anything entailed between us?'" '"Yes...

...where did you learn that...

...Are you?'" '"Am I what?'" '"Are you my-?'" "'Am I your what?'"—which is in itself a breakthrough for a girl who has given up completely on the effort of communicating: "Sometimes she thought she had gone crazy rather than have to talk to people...

...The two of them converse in a kind of lapsed speech...

...Perhaps it is because his observations are recognizable and yet not really very personal that one does not feel caught in his narrative the way one feels implicated, say, in the ignominies of the narrator of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes...

...The malaise is the pain of loss...

...He/She is an exacting, claustrophobic account of the diffuseness that characterizes contemporary bonds...

...Percy's tone draws you in precisely because it always maintains a distance—thepo-litesse, if you will, of acknowledging that we lend it an ear in hopes of hearing about ourselves...

...The strangest part is that the separation changes so little...

...He cries, for instance: " 'I respect your feelings,' she said...

...who should find him, bruised and famished and tired, but the wood-sprite herself, an expert in the art of reluctant survival—Allison...

...As an assistant principal in an inner-city school, he spends more time than formerly with a problematic black student, until other women fill up the gaps in his attention...

...So it goes, on and on and round and round and where the truth falls nobody knows: '"I feel abandoned,' she said....He murmured softly, cautiously, 'I was abandoned by you, darling.' 'Oh go to hell,' she said...

...And they continue to make love...

...She, meanwhile, finds him sexier now that she's untied him:" 'Where did you learn that...

...Women have been finding themselves and finding themselves some more and still, the bewildered men must be thinking, they're not happy...

...The Second Coming is a very wise and very funny novel that resists the "God-forsakenness" of the world we live in by yielding, without undue sentiment, to the possibility that there is still enough light left by which to make our way back home...

...Rooms are only rooms...

...For it is not, you understand, as though he has fallen out of favor with her...

...Was it a feeling of someone present or someone absent...

...So we are presented with the panic of a husband whose wife leaves him not out of hatred or boredom but because she has become an advocate of the politics of leaving: '"I'm thirty,' she said, 'thirty-one in six weeks, and I only feel like half a woman...

...The room seemed to have an emotion of its own...

...The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo's ghost...

...No, rooms do not have emotions...

...Gold tells the commonest of contemporary stories—the break-up of a marriage—with an almost myopic intensity from the male point of view...

...Having to give up a little "freedom" to get a little "security"—is it this unfortunate but necessary predicate of adulthood that is being overturned by all the women striding toward equality...

...Will returns to his gentry-like existence but continues to feel inconsolable...

...He takes an apartment of his own and she takes to Single Parent Life...

...and psychiatric diagnosis of Will's "petty-mall" spells as "Hausmann's Syndrome," including the symptom of wahnsinnige Sehnsucht or "inappropriate longing...

...An odd-shaped cloud in the blue Carolina sky reminded him of a missing tile in the Columbus Circle subway station...

...In his subsequent novels and essays—none, to my mind, quite as breathtaking as his initial effort—Percy has continued to explore this theme of existential homelessness, formulated in his uniquely unprepossessing way...

...I spent my twenties with you and I want to be free now.'" Although it would seem impossible to argue someone out of such premises, he tries everything, including some proverbial female tactics...

...I don't respect blubbering.'" He volunteers to look after Cynthia, their daughter, while she goes off with a lover: "In the bathroom he caught sight of himself, barefoot, frazzled, nearly ten pounds down from his weight of a few weeks ago, carrying between two fingers a shitty diaper...

...The nostalgic Marxist critic, George Lukacs, in his classic The Theory of the Novel, connected the rise of the novel to the loss of that very sense-making, to what he called "the God-forsakenness of the world...

...They continue, too, to make love...

...Oh, it's good,' she said...

...He/She is about domestic terror: "There was a smell of anxiety, his own...

...Yet when her birthday comes around he takes her to dinner at the Italian place where they are known from past birthday celebrations...

...Binx diverts himself by escorting long-legged secretaries with names like Linda and Sharon to the movies, but all the while he is aware of the quandary that underlies his elaborate casualness: "What is the malaise...

...Once, we had visions of order, the epics, Homer and Dante...

...now, we have only that baffled, irony-embracing form known as the novel-the epic," according to Lukacs, "of a world that has been abandoned by God...

...you ask...

...it has some of that quality of almost eerie familiarity which the earlier work possessed in abundance...

...Slowly, he gets used to it...

...Determined to understand his father's suicide, he descends into Lost Cove cave and prepares to meet Death in the face...

...A whiff of rabbit tobacco in North Carolina reminded him of Ethel Rosenblum and a patch of weeds in Mississippi...

...How he hated the fake sadness of things...

...Their divorce was amicable and mysterious...

...His first novel, The Moviegoer, detailed "the idea of a search" as it occurred to a laconic young stockbroker living in a suburb of New Orleans...

...Percy is a genius at evoking a certain writerly intimacy without the uneasy confessional pressure this usually brings to bear upon the reader...

...Walker Percy is a creator of skewed visions that slowly, il-luminatingly, right themselves...

...Til be back.'" "'When?'" "'Soon.'" '"There are some things I must do.'" '"What about this...

...sweat, his own...

...But it is all to no avail...

...We are used to conceiving of women as fragile, ^finitely wound-able: He/She discloses the ache of maleness...

...These periods of "green-glade lonesomeness" that occur within even the most mutually-responsive of relationships have always been, I think, of greater interest to Percy than the various contingencies life has in store...

...They continue to talk—endlessly—about anger and sadness, how he makes her impatient, how she makes him yearning...

...What is the entailment?' " This communion eventually triumphs over real obstacles—Allison's mother, who happens to have been a college sweetheart of the man now romancing her daughter...

...When?'" "'Now.'" '"Is the leaving...

...He even agrees to go with her to a "Gestalt Therapist Team" who speak ominously and incomprehensibly about "Power Flux" and "Hidden Goods...

...Is it the condition of being born female they are up in arms about or the condition of being, simply, born...

...She fiddles with her appearance: "Men were a burden to her now, and she alternated between jeans and boots and defiant, old-fashioned feminine drag, even to doing her nails and wearing a long skirt...

...These questions occurred to me as I was reading Herbert Gold's stark and wistful new novel, He/She (Arbor House, 213 pp., $9.95), whose very title suggests how abstract the mating-call has become since the days when Stanley Kowalski bellowed for his Stella...

...o ne of the reasons the world has ceased to make sense for men, I have no doubt, is what has happened to women...

...It is alternately trying and appealing, much in the way of two people who have come to understand each other without being sure they really want to...

...She nurses him back to health and in the process they discover a communion of innuendo: "'I have to leave,' he said...

...The "ordinariness of midafternoon" turns "minatory" and he no longer knows, figuratively speaking, where he stands: "Everything reminded him of something else...

...Then Will meets up with Allison, who is living in an abandoned greenhouse after having escaped from a mental institution...

...The Second Coming (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 360 pp., $12.95), Walker Percy's latest novel, seems to me to be his best since The Moviegoer...

...It also overcomes the subjective hindrances to what Allison calls "a life of smiling ease with someone else...

...But Will, it seems, is fated to live...

...The Second Coming is about Will Barrett, a prosperous middle-aged widower who loses his psychic footing on a lush golf course in Linwood, North Carolina...

...He has described them with sly poignancy in each of his books, and in this one Will thinks to himself: "There was something he didn't like about the light of the setting sun filling the empty room...

...fear, his own...

...Walker Percy is one of the few contemporary writers who has tackled the confounded state we find ourselves in head-on...

...For balanced against his characters' acute sense of emotional suspension is the author's even keener sense of place...

...and when they both were silent like this, it was as if he were far away, watching, listening, smelling the terror he emitted like the smell of sour milk...