Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404110137
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT HILLDRUP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
For those who missed - or couldn't afford - the highly honored 1992 hardback edition, this new trade paperback printing of the biography of the most remarkable American novelist of the second half of the 20th century cannot have come too soon.
Walker Percy, the Mississippi M.D. who lived out his life and writing career in a small Louisiana town, was a quiet genius in the oldest and best sense of the term - a man who took his thoughts seriously, but not himself. His six novels prove it, as do his essays, most notably his works on language, the malaise and Kierkegaard, the Protestant existentialist who helped lead him to Roman Catholicism.
Percy's family is a distinguished one, a family already the subject of its own history (``The Percys of Mississippi''). Walker Percy, orphaned by violent death, was raised by a bachelor cousin, Will Percy, whose book of some 55 years ago, ``Lanterns on the Levee,'' remains the best account yet writen of the Southern temper, its nature, its burdens and its hopes. (Ironically, it was praised and perceived as a brilliant liberal voice; today, sadly and erroneously, it would be attacked as reactionary paternalism.)
Walker Percy came somewhat late to the novelist's career. ``The Moviegoer,'' which won both a National Book Award and almost no initial audience, was published when he was 40. He had been dabbling at writing since his long recovery from tuberculosis, contracted while performing autopsies in New York shortly after his graduation from medical school.
What marked Percy's life and his writing was man's uniqueness, aloneness and sense of separation from that place in Creation where he belongs. It was a recognition most tragic for those who refuse to perceive it or, having done so, think scientific rationalism, or humanism, are somehow the answers and the protections.
But Percy was no preacher, no prosyletizer and certainly no modern mystic. He was, instead, a humble Sovereign Wayfarer (the name, incidentally, chosen by Martin Luschei for his early work on Percy, the best critique yet written, and by far superior to the more widely proclaimed book by Robert Coles).
For Percy, the evidence of the Fall, and its continuing effect, makes perfect sense. Only the Kierkegaardian ``leap of faith'' into the bosom and hope of Roman Catholic Christianity provided, for him, the answer by which he tried to live. It is, as Tolson notes, a position he shares with other Southern Roman Catholic writers, such as Flannery O'Connor, albeit with more gentleness and humor.
Such humor, in my judgment, makes Percy's ``Love in the Ruins'' his most readable and entertaining novel, a bit of comic futurism in which his hero and alter ego, Dr. Tom More, does battle with both drink and the Devil in a world very much like our own; one that is crazy and doesn't know it.
Percy died four years ago, a long and painful death, leaving a heritage that, even for the non-Roman Catholic or non-Christian, is awesome in its intellectual faith and in the hope that when we are all fully secularized and scientific - including, sadly, the church itself - then the Christian miracle may be more clearly seen and - perhaps - believed.
Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
by CNB