PERCY AMIS
Percy and Amis Reviewed by Lucy Johnson " T UGKY is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him," might be the text of The Last Gentleman, the story of how...
...The contrasts from region to region in the relationships between individuals, between the sexes, between the races, between man and his physical surroundings are vividly realized...
...Percy has made him handsome and often capable as well, amiable and charming, deeply touching but not at all the popular contemporary anti-hero...
...Catching a spy and fathoming the mystery of the horrible mission of Operation Apollo are obviously small potatoes when matched against questions of evil, death, God...
...Seeing through the eyes of a dislocated, unjudging young man is another, and, in The Last Gentleman, & most successful way...
...This theme is the background to several comic characters—most notably a villainous psychiatrist, a bumbling secret agent, and a happy widow who enjoys "conspicuous polyandry"—and a number of funny episodes ranging from farce to wit...
...I think it was a mistake that he adopted the thriller form...
...The book is not an allegory, or a fantasy, or a parody, or a black comedy...
...The entertainment value of the thriller form is lost, and nothing is more dreary than an unamusing suspense story...
...Looking backward, there is pleasure in recognizing the skill with which Amis had slowly built up his sinister house of cards until it seems quite real and solid, then pulled out a bottom ace to bring the whole thing down at once, and finally slyly leaned two cards together again to start anew...
...Will and the younger daughter fall in love...
...Who in the world wants to bother with a mess like that...
...Will, twenty-five and at the end of the line, literally did not know what to think and "became a watcher and a listener and a wanderer...
...When the novel begins, Will Barrett, who comes from the Delta country of Louisiana and attended Princeton, had been working in New York for Macy's as a "humidification engineer" (a janitor) and undergoing psychoanalysis for five years...
...the mother talks to him about her passionate anti-fluoridation and super-patriotic activities...
...another daughter, a nun, attempts to deputize him "to practice priestcraft" and to act as gobetween in her relations with her family...
...Besides all of this he has a knee tic and a deaf ear...
...Whether this delimitation is tragic or the ultimate solution to all problems remains a question throughout, but the surface of this second novel by Walker Percy is so brilliant and the sheer pleasure of reading it is so great that it can be enjoyed with a minimum of certainty about deeper meanings...
...In addition, there is a touching love story...
...He had developed a "nervous condition...
...He is subject to deja vus and periods of amnesia when he wanders around hardly aware of his own name...
...With these points in his favor, it is a disappointment that Amis has not made more of the whole thing...
...the words do not mirror life, but instead act as a lens focusing on the gesture or phrase or memory which gives the essence of whatever Percy wants to show...
...Percy's humor is continuous and wry...
...What seems to have happened in The Anti-Death League is that Amis has tried to juggle too many ideas, too many techniques, and too many gimmicks...
...The lovers-are-losers, death-is-banal, God-is-evil nihilism is quite movingly presented and over the length of the book its power grows...
...I'm afraid that I couldn't really let myself go on the spy aspects because, being an old hand at spotting suspicious characters in suspense stories, I knew all the time that an author like Kingsley Amis setting out to write a thriller was the one to keep an eye on...
...Over the years his family had turned ironical and lost its gift for action...
...Percy and Amis Reviewed by Lucy Johnson " T UGKY is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him," might be the text of The Last Gentleman, the story of how Williston Bibb Barrett slowly defined himself in the alien modern world and "came to see that he was not destined to do everything but only one or two things...
...His ear for dialogue and dialect is superb, undoubtedly even better than this Northern reviewer knows how to appreciate...
...America is not monolithic, and its infinite variety and paradox are what make it so much more difficult than it was when the world was small and there were absolutes in "the old honorable days...
...He spies and eavesdrops...
...But most important of all is the way everything fits together in an irresistible story of the No Man's Land between the impossible romantic past and the inevitable pragmatic future...
...He does not know how to live his life...
...the father wants to swallow him in another way—by having Will work for the Confederate Chevrolet agency, the second largest in the world, and be his expert partner in country club foursomes at golf...
...It is instead an eccentric book about real people—eccentric because its people and its places are looked at and listened to directly...
...This fresh view makes a novel that is funny and tragic and wonderfully readable and true...
...It is entirely believable that he is liked by everyone and particularly that the Vaughts, a rich Alabama family he meets in New York, want to involve Will with themselves...
...He is descended from an "honorable and violent family, but gradually the violence had been deflected and turned inward...
...Everything looked strange .. . he had no second opinions and he could see things afresh...
...As Will travels from New York along New Jersey turnpikes to Pennsylvania and on through Virginia and the Carolinas to the Birmingham suburb where the Vaughts live, and from there through the Delta country and across Texas to Santa Fe, we see a slice of American culture as revelatory in its completely different way as was Nabokov's famous cross-country tour in Lolita...
...Sure enough, the book is a hybrid —part thriller and part large thoughts on death and God...
...He wants to move into the world where Kurt Vonnegut works so successfully and on his first try hasn't quite made it...
...But, of course, Amis is really writing a serious comic novel...
...A child's vision of the adult world is an often-used way of exposing everyday oddities and hypocrisies...
...Kingsley Amis, the author of Lucky Jim and One Fat Englishman, strikes off into new and hypothetically fascinating territory—a world of secret nuclear Army activities called Operation Apollo, complete with spies and spy hunters...
...This is not simple, every-leaf-on-the-tree realism...
...Again, the thriller form is a drawback, since it burdens the novel with a lot of cumbersome detail that is essentially boring, and boring in the writing as well...
...The Anti-Death League is more resistible...
...Much of the time [Will] was like a man who has crawled out of a bombed building...
...he is hired to be a companion to the young son who is dying of leukemia...
...When the frivolity of the subject is made clear, the formula is broken, the suspense disappears, and who cares whether X or Z is after the secret weapon...
...the older son, a doctor barred from regular practice, tries to draw Will into his nihilism...
...In social situations his personal radar responds so sensitively to people (including his psychoanalyst) that he acts only the parts they expect him to play, recognizing no center that is himself...
Vol. 30 • October 1966 • No. 10
