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Title: The Last Gentleman : A Novel by Walker Percy ISBN: 0-312-24308-1 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 04 September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.85 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Last Gentleman: What it means to pass from death to life
Comment: Marooned in New York City, displaced Southerner Will Barrett finds himself utterly abstracted
from his world and himself. When a chance encounter in Central Park leads him to make the
acquaintance of the Vaughts, fellow Southerners who knew his father, Will embarks on a journey
that he hopes will tell him what he desperately needs to know. What does he need to know?
If Will knew the answer to that, he wouldn't need the Vaughts, or the South, or the haunted
memory of his father. Traversing the country, Will seeks the one man he believes will tell
him what to do. Percy not only weaves a lush character study of lost Will, but realizes
a profound meditation on the nature of identity, place, and home. Above all, like any
good picaresque novel, Will's journey is not so much about the end, but about what he discovers along the way. However, as a testament to
Percy's imagination and probity, Will's final destination provides nothing less than utter
revelation. I closed this book and jumped out of bed immediately, my breath coming in gulps
as I absorbed and processed what Walker Percy had taught me with such love, patience, beauty
and truth.
Rating: 3
Summary: A little disappointing
Comment: I have long been a fan of Walker Percy's essays and his novel The Moviegoer, a novel that will always resonate with me as someone who grew up in the South. Yet The Last Gentleman, to me, was something of a disappointment. Will Barrett is a thinly drawn character, a product of Percy's fascination with amnesia as a critical path toward waking up to life itself. Walker is fascinated with amnesia and other shocks as a device to draw attention to the complacent familiarity of the everyday, as observed by someone who has just awakened to the ongoing scene, a kind of latter day Rip Van Winkle.
But in this novel, this gets a little tedious. Instead of showing us the strangeness of the everyday, Percy has Barrett tell us that it is strange, or employs the device of having the failed physician, Sutter, do the telling in a journal of sorts.
One thing really puzzles me about Percy's entire work: his curious inability to render black people interesting or meaningful. He was writing about the South of the late 1950s and the 1960s but his African-American characters are cartoons about a captive people. I think this is a tip-off to one of Percy's blind spots masquerading as a philosophical stance. He wants us to accept that our struggle toward meaning and our existential "lostness" is far more fundamental and urgent than our inhumanity toward our fellow beings. This is a serious distortion of the existentialist position and it's made worse by Percy's refusal to offer complex, interesting and thick characerizations of black people in a South that was exploding.
One of the reasons for our lostness is that the very familiarity of the ordinary and everyday spins an amnesiac spell over us all toward the brutal inhumanities and indignities occurring right under our noses. We have all become lost and complicit in our lostness, not just to our true self and its existential predicament but also to our essential humanity.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Meaning of Salvation
Comment: I recently read The Moviegoer by Percy, and I would definately rate it as my favorite novel. I was really excited to pick of The Last Gentleman as my second Percy novel, and though I would not rate it as highly as The Moviegoer, it was far from a disappointment. It is certainly a book that I will cherish among my very favorites.
The primary character of the novel is Bill Barrett (who is more often called the engineer). The engineer suffers from amnesia and periods of deja vu, and he reads about a near-apocolyptic catostrophe and wonders if it has already happened. He is the lost (dead) American. One day, looking through his telescope, he sees a girl, and the result is that he becomes involved with her family the Vaughts. The relationship with them ends up sending him on a journey through the South and on to New Mexico, a journey in which he gains a type of salvation.
One of Percy's primary beliefs about novel writing was that it should be entertaining, and The Last Gentleman succeeds. It is at times hilarious and is often moving. It is true that there are periods where it drags a little, but the truths Percy presents more than make up for those sections. The Last Gentleman is a supremely beautiful, entertaining, and thoughtful novel.
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Title: The Second Coming : A Novel by Walker Percy ISBN: 0312243243 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 13 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy ISBN: 0312243111 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy ISBN: 0375701966 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Thanatos Syndrome : A Novel by Walker Percy ISBN: 0312243324 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 04 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Lancelot : A Novel by Walker Percy ISBN: 0312243073 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 04 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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