BOOKS
631
imminent film version,
Loon Lake
has made a big splash. Walker
Percy's
The Second Coming
arrived quietly upon the scene. None of his
novels -
The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot
- have become properties, and yet Percy's work is substantial, and
each novel has enlarged the place he holds in modern American lit–
erature.
The Second Coming
begins on a golf course in Linwood,
North Carolina. Standing in a bunker with his sand iron, appraising
the lie of his ball, Will Barrett, a wealthy, retired Wall Street lawyer
whose wife has just died and whose only daughter is about to be
wed, passes out, falls down in the sand trap , and wakes with the
question of existence before him. At the same time, in another place
in the novel, a young woman, Allison Huger, is planning her escape
from a mental hospital, methodically writing a script for it so that
she will know precisely what to do and say. Their paths will cross on
the golf course, in Arcady, and this crossing generates the meaning
of
The Second Coming.
Will Barrett and Allison Huger will be "born
again," together, on the far side of despair, in belief. What that belief
is, apart from a romantic belief in romance, is not all that clear.
There are soft spots in Percy's resolution of the novel, sentimental
instances, and yet the feeling of the narrative, of its style, is marve–
lous . It could indeed be argued that the romance does not wrong the
seriousness of
The Second Coming,
that , contrariwise, Percy suffuses
the romance with seriousness.
If
this is what
The Second Coming
is - a
serious romance - then perhaps the question of its smooth ending is
beside the point.
No one is kinder to despair than Walker Percy. Despair is
always sweet in his fiction , the mark of intelligence, of sensibility, of
those who are attuned to the disharmony of the cosmos. It is well–
spoken and yet direct in its address. "Do you believe in God?" Bar–
rett asks his glib minister, Jack Curl.
It
is a Kierkegaardian
question. Those who are in despair recognize each other, affiliate,
fall in love with each other and constitute, in effect, the finest cadre
among the classes of men and women. They see each other across
the crowded room. There is a right response to Barrett's question,
but he'll not get it from Jack Curl. Only Allison - reemerging in dis–
course, relearning language, building a lexicon-will understand
the despair that makes the question , will take Barrett as he is . She
speaks a strange, disconnected idiom that is in part the broken
speech of a mental patient whose brain has been "buzzed" too often
by electroshock , and which is yet also the purer, halting speech of
the child who is striving to learn what words mean , how sentences
