Why Read Walker Percy?

The short answer is because he is a brilliant writer. But there are many brilliant writers out there, so why him in particular? What follows is my attempt to explain why I return to him again and again.

To begin with there’s his life. The fact that his father and likely his mother committed suicide.  In his 60s, he was asked what he considered his greatest accomplishment, to which he answered, “Being here.” Suicide haunted him, as is apparent in reading his novels featuring Will Barrett.  He even wrote a short essay entitled, “Suicide as a Cure for Depression,” which appeared as part of his work Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.

His journey to becoming an author is likewise highly unusual. He was trained as a medical doctor, but contracted tuberculosis during his internship. During his time in the sanitorium, he began immersing himself in the European existentialists, in particular in Soren Kierkegaard. He became convinced that science, which he had once believed held all the answers to life, was not even asking the right questions, let alone providing relevant answers. He then took the next decade or so to study semiotics—essentially the theory of signs/language—even publishing a couple of essays in academic journals. Then he tried his hand at writing novels.  His first two were mainly for practice, since he never submitted them for publication. His first “real” novel was The Moviegoer, published in 1961, when he was 45 years old. It won the American Book Award for Fiction.  Not bad for a first effort.

He followed this with The Last Gentleman in 1966; Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World in 1971; Lancelot in 1977; The Second Coming in 1980; and The Thanatos Syndrome in 1987. Despite their outstanding merit, none of these novels won any major prizes, largely (I suspect) because the literary establishment didn’t know what to make of his religious turn. His two major non-fiction works were The Message in the Bottle in 1975, which dealt with semiotics, and the aforementioned Lost in the Cosmos, in 1983. This book includes a primer in semiotics and proves so effective as an introduction to philosophical issues that it has been used as a required text in philosophy courses.

Before trying to describe what makes his writing so appealing to me, I should add that his novels have a couple of other idiosyncrasies. Of the six novels, four have repeat main characters: Will Barrett appears in both The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming.  Dr. Thomas More features in both Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome. This gives us fascinating “before and after” studies of these enigmatic characters. The only one of his works I would describe as dark is Lancelot, though it is a darkness well worth exploring.

My favourite of his novels, indeed one of my favourite novels period, is The Second Coming. I simply love the dialogue between Allie (a recent escapee from a psychiatric institution) and Will Barrett. Though her speech sounds superficially crazy, Will recognizes the deep sanity (or perhaps quest for sanity) hidden within it.  Indeed, this is the beauty of Percy’s fiction, his capacity to disclose the depths of his characters as they struggle to find themselves within a deranged world that passes for normal. Percy’s great gift is to allow us to recognize ourselves within the existential landscapes he so deftly paints.

A word of caution. Percy is a southerner, writing before the strictures of political correctness had taken hold of the literary world, so his fiction contains things that will offend our contemporary ears. But then again, do did Mark Twain’s and Joseph Conrad’s. And I still contend that we are better off reading such works than we are cancelling them.

But as I said to begin, the primary reason we should read Percy is because he is a brilliant writer with much to teach us.