Word: barretts
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...turned retired golfer. But by the time the novel reaches its own crisis Percy has launched so many conflicting ideas into the narrative--like a crazed club pro madly driving his golf balls into the fairway--that the reader has no idea which to follow, which to ignore. Will Barrett, Percy's protagonist, leads a remarkably untroubled life, driving his Mercedes 450 SEL to the golf course and then back home. Only memories disturb his endowed existence: as This Second Coming unfolds he mentally pieces together the events of a day in his early teens when, out on a hunting...
This expedition in mental archeology uncovers a lot more than that memory: it brings to the surface of Barrett's mind a collection of bizarre obsessions that are apparently Percy's as well. First, there is Barrett's notion that the presence or absence of Jews is a sign of the impending return of Christ. Not that he carefully studies the evidence; he simply decides that the special history of the Jews is, well, a sign that God exists. then there's his fascination with the military life, the frontier if, the man's life, the life which (he argues...
...decides Will Barrett, anyway. So thought Hans Castorp--a lot more eloquently--in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain: "For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts...
...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 finally short-circuits and decides to challenge God to prove his existence by descending into a cave and waiting for a sign, Allison nurses him back to health. "Lately I tend to fall down," he says. "That's all right I tend to pick things up. I'm a hoister...
...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...