BOOKS
451
the water in between." The argument between Furber and Omensetter
may, by implication, also be regarded as that between consciousness and
physicality, the moral and the nonmoral, the soul and the body; but
despite its philosophical interest, this conflict remains abstract. It is not
realized novelistically, for all too often, in this book, the characters are
reduced (or universalized) to general positions, and when, at length,
the author comes upon a plot, it is entirely too conventional for his
ambitious purposes.
What is unconventional is Mr. Gass's style, and that too is un–
fortunate. Freely associative, overwrought, the prose is in excess of both
the characters and setting; the language, so rhythmic that its ultimate
effect is mesmerizing, often suggests an improbable marriage between
Joyce and Robert Frost. Mr. Gass has a great deal of ability, but in this
book his writing, like his plot, is unequal to his aspirations.
The most distinguished of these four novels is Walker Percy's
The
Last Gentleman.
Though the prose is capable of the subtlest modula–
tions of thought and expression, it maintains a certain lyrical opacity; it
never ceases to arrest and fascinate. This is a novel alive with ideas and
one in which every detail is beautifully perceived. Mr. Percy can dis–
criminate between cars, for example, the way nineteenth-century novel–
ists discriminated between carriages; whether he describes "a noble
black Buick, a venerable four-holer," or an Edsel, "sunk at one corner
and flatulent in its muffler, spuriously elegant and unsound, like a Ne–
gro's car, a fake Ford," he is locating his characters, specifying their
particular environment.
The book's protagonist is Williston Bibb Barrett, a young engineer,
born in the South, who left Princeton for no good reason after two years
there. "Over the years," the author observes, "his family had turned
ironical and lost its gift for action. It was an honorable and violent
family, but gradually the violence had been deflected and turned in–
ward.... As for the present young man, the last of the line, he did not
know what to think." Barrett suffers from "a nervous condition" (he
has occasional attacks of amnesia, for instance), but since the author's
conception of character is almost totalIy apsychological, there is little
temptation to regard his story as case history. (The reader is discouraged
countless times from placing a hyper-psychological construction on the
facts. At one point, Rita, who espouses all interpretations psychological,
is told by her ex-husband, Sutter Vaught, "'I don't mind telIing you
that I never really approved your using technical terms like "penis envy"
in
ordinary conversation-.' ") Mr. Percy is concerned with moral more
than mental states: he characterizes Son Junior as "a pale glum fornica-
