Word: lancelot
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...Lancelot's pursuit of what he calls "the Unholy Grail" leads him to commit several murders and arson. He, in turn, is committed to a New Orleans insane asylum, where he has one room with a view of Lafayette Cemetery. There he tells his story to a friend who has become a Catholic priest. But Lancelot's confession is anything but repentant. It is both a funny and a scarifying jeremiad on the modern...
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 U.S.A. is full of demonic women who, driven by as yet unnamed furies, are desperately restoring and preserving places, buildings?" He tosses off witty remarks about the vacuities of Hollywood and about the strange things that occur when the film crew sets up in his town: "What was nutty...
Percy, of course, made this very observation the theme of The Moviegoer. Lancelot frequently says things that the author has written elsewhere, especially in The Message in the Bottle (1975), a collection of essays on the oddities of language and mankind. Because Percy and Lancelot share some opinions, there will inevitably be those who assume that they agree on everything. And since Lancelot utters enough reactionary claptrap to offend everyone, Percy is likely to get a lot of angry mail, particularly from women. Says Lancelot: "What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center...
Swiftian Disgust. Percy does not fully avoid liability for such beliefs. He clearly uses Lancelot's Swiftian disgust at the "whorehouse and fagdom of America" to score points against contemporary permissiveness. One sometimes wonders just how loony Percy's hero is intended to be. Is it probable that a canny good ole boy like Lancelot would go violently round the bend at the news of his wife's cheating...
...question is valid and not terribly important to the novel. For the purposes of his argument, Percy harries Lancelot into an extreme position. Taking both his hero's part and that of the silent but attentive priest, the author stages a debate in which the middle ground has been blasted away. "I cannot tolerate this age," Lancelot raves in his cell. "What is more, I won't. That was my discovery: that I didn't have...