Word: lancelot
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...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 your eyes to new kinds of wrongness in the world now has grown conservative, even reactionary. The eyes that once held the greatest depth, the silences that bore such meaning hypnotize you and hold you for a moment, but then you wonder whether still waters run deep or stagnant...
Even with his humorous and noble style intact, Lancelot is Percy's bitterest novel, written not with the black humor of alienation but with the crotchety distemper of a curmudgeon. It does not add to Lancelot Edwarde Lamar's credibility as an existential visionary that he speaks from a private cell in a mental hospital, reflecting on his incineration of his adulterous wife and her lover on his family estate. There is a sense that Percy feels ambivalent towards a character who might be his spokesman and who might also be crazy...
...Lancelot is a phenomenon comparable to Travis Bickel (Taxi Driver) as an ex-Southern gentleman. Like Travis Bickel, Lancelot takes the matter of moral response and retribution into his own hands. For them violence is the only way to take a moral stand or to make anyone pay attention...
...plan is a patchwork of medieval chivalry, Confederate rhetoric and shoot-'em-up justice. He will go away with the girl in the next room - a patient in the asylum who has been gang-raped into insensibility. In Lancelot's view, this outrage has purified her of every indulgence he hates in the modern world. Together they will be the new Adam and Eve, dedicated to "a stern code, a gentleness toward women and an intolerance of swinishness...
...Lancelot's plan is clearly crazed. Percy's questioning is something else. Simply by asking whether flaccid tolerance is not as brutalizing as rigid in tolerance, he raises the kind of issue that good fiction can most thoroughly show in the round. Despite its occasional reediness of tone and a bitterness that seems more peevish than profound, Lancelot makes an entertaining run at high seriousness. It is easy to read and hard to forget. Paul Gray