Word: allison
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...Nazis and Jews, about other sensitive subjects and still leave room for himself to disavow then if a reader gets too offended. But in The Second Coming, Percy introduces a new sort of character--the genuine schizophrenic, not a mouthpiece for his own questionable ideas but a true dysfunctional. Allison, a post-shock-therapy mental hospital escapee, approaches the external world as if it were a book written in a foreign language, intelligible only with the aid of a vocabulary key. she speaks with affecting hesitation, her sentences full of internal rhymes. She lives in an abandoned greenhouse. After Barrett...
Unlike Barrett, a sententious rehash of every Walker Percy hero of the past (in fact, a direct borrowing from The Last Gentleman), Allison is a new creation, and she provides what little direction there is to The Second Coming's rambling. But too often Percy seems to be writing out of habit, letting the alienation and existential ideology flow lazily down the same channels cut by his earlier novels. Some of his metaphors are meaningless, form without substance...
...asks the reader--Percy? Allison? It would be very easy for he author to clean up some of these passages--like Barrett's first-person tirades against his father, unexpectedly thrown into passages of third-person narrative--simply by substituting a name for a pronoun here, adding quotation marks there...
...novel of ideas, conversations like this inevitably bode romance. sure enough, Barrett and Allison fall in love, and Percy presents this newfound love as the sign from God Barrett was waiting...
Percy became a cult hero by writing about the emptiness at the bottom of American prosperity. That doesn't mean he can't write a happy ending if he wants to. But The Second Coming's conclusion, with Will and Allison starting their lives over together, simply ignores all of Percy's oft-repeated questions. Barrett will have his work, his wife, and God too in the bargain. All dilemmas are resolved, with no explanations...