Word: allisons
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...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...
...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...
...devises a plan "to settle the question of God once and for all." He will go into a labyrinthian mountain cave and simply sit until he receives a sign. What he gets instead is a toothache, which drives him out of hiding and into the care of Allison, a young schizophrenic who has escaped from a sanitarium and is living in a greenhouse right beneath the cave. Emerging from his vigil, Will Barrett goes through the glass roof and literally falls in love...