PARTISAN REVIEW
293
by lucid prose, finn grasp of theme, and a feel for the South as it is–
the look-alike new cities, "the used-car lot, Dairy Queen, junk store
waste that spread around the city like a poisonous film in every direc–
tion," the country club suburbanites, the boosters, the small towns still
happily stuck in their down-home ways.
And then there is Walker Percy. He is not a "young" novelist, but
his career has been relatively brief and his perceptions are incom–
parably fresh. In
The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman,
and now
Love
in the Ruins,
he has provided the definitive portrayal of theticky-tacky
new South, a portrayal drawn with clarity, humor, and gentlemanly out–
rage.
Love in the Ruins
mayor may not
be
the best of his novels, but
its hilarious nightmare fantasy of what in a few years the South could
become has the ring of truth. The novel is political, and its politics suit no
one's ideological convenience but the author's. Percy is antiprogramma–
tic, suspicious of zealots of every persuasion, certain only of the enduring
values of knowledge, tradition, civility, dignity, decelI1cy, and diversity.
When his antiheroic hero, Thomas More, retreats from futuristic mad–
ness to an island hideaway, it is
. because it's home and I like its easy-going ways, its religious
confusion, racial hodgepodge, misty green woods, and sleepy bayous.
People still stop and help strangers lying in ditches having been
set upon by thieves or just plain drunk. Good nature prevails, even
between enemies.
As
the saying goes in Louisiana: you may be a
son of a bitch, but you're my son of a bitch.
So, in the end, Walker Percy takes us back to where we started:
closeness to the land, neighborliness, humility before the lessons of
rus–
tory. The Southern novel as we have known it is a thing of the past–
though what a rich and glorious past - but its great themes still beckon.
The first Southern novelists located and defined them; now, perhaps,
it is the task of the new novelists to keep them alive.
Jonathan Yardley
