Word: apocalypticism
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FOR SOMEONE who was looking forward to the next in a series of apocalyptic novels by Walker Percy, Lancelot is like a disappointing rendezvous with an old flame. It lacks the electricity of former days, the stunning moments of lucidity and passion. The one who once radicalized you and opened...
PERCY IS NOT a stuffy, uninformed Christian. He believes that scientists are capable of exploring the "angel side" of man but that they will not find anything but biochemistry in chimpanzees. To Percy, the overriding evidence of man's spirituality is the habit of language, or the spark that led...
Catastrophe pervades Percy's psychology. It takes an apocalyptic force to shake Lancelot out of a seven-year stupor in which his only pleasure in life was Raymond Chandler novels, and into a reevaluation of his quality of life (which moves him to such drastic action). Percy's characters often...
Lancelot tells another hurricane story as an emblem of his apocalyptic intentions and in counterpoint to the movie and all it represents. A moment of brilliant clarity hit a middle-aged couple in the face of the hurricane: they realized and said out loud how bored they were with their...
Lunatics with apocalyptic visions can be wearisome. Thanks to Percy's inventiveness and rapid pacing, Lancelot is not. In fact, he often sounds like a man playing out a symphony of Dostoyevskian experiences on a kazoo: "Did you know that the South and for all I know the entire...