Lancelot: A Novel

I read this because it was on the "LOST" book list. I didn't have any expectations for what this book was or how it was relevant to one of my favorite TV shows. I enjoyed reading it but I'm "lost" trying to find a way to review it. I recommend it because I remember it fondly but I'm not quite sure why.

After I read this book I had no choice but to immediately consume Walker Percy's novels. Reading Lancelot was like having the top of my head blown off and surviving the experience more awake and alive than ever. In an era where no one is really sure what they believe anymore, Percy sets out an interesting test. If you discovered clear evidence of evil, what would that tell you about the existence of good and maybe even God? I strongly suggest you take this journey and pay very close attention to the parallel travels of the main character's confidant, a priest-psychologist who is himself in crisis. If you do so, the ending will make the hairs stand up on the back on your neck.

This book is a conversation between Lancelot Lamar and Percival. Lancelot, once a member of New Orleans' landed gentry, is now confined to a mental institution. Percival is a priest who went to medical school, and has devoted his life to altruistic endeavors. Lancelot was a "liberal" southern lawyer who validated his existence by working in civil rights litigation before a discovery that changed his life. This discovery causes a great awakening. This theme of awakening is prominent in Percy's works. A character arrives at an existential moment in which he realizes that his life to this point has been as a dream: "Do you know what happened to me during the past twenty years? A gradual, ever so gradual, slipping away of my life into a kind of dream state in which finally I could not be sure that anything was happening at all. Perhaps nothing happened." As Lancelot retraces the events in this monologue, we watch the progress of his mental state, and his weighing of possible world views. His selection of a world view will determine his actions.Another of Walker Percy's major literary themes is captured in an encounter between Lancelot and Elgin, a black MIT student. Lancelot mused, "Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life." On another level, Lancelot is a southern white who has roiling feelings about women. His struggle to allow women to be sexual creatures is mirrored in his expressed feelings about his mother, then about his wife, Margot. The reader senses a that Lancelot's feelings toward women are a river of ambivalence. Curiously, this is similar to Pat Conroy's characters, whose southern white characters either lust after or endure their mother, depending on the moment.If you like Walker Percy, you'll love this book. I do, and I recommend it.

Walker Percy really tackles evil in this, perhaps, his finest novel. He let his demons take center stage, and the dark, brooding novel emerges for what it most certainly is, a stupendous moral examination of our culture. Lancelot is not his most widely read work, for I suspect, this very reason. One need only look at the recent tragedy in Littleton to see why. All the grief counselors and therapists attempt to explain the unexplainable. Unfortunately, since we have lost a moral speech, we can't call a spade a spade. Evil has disappeared from our lexicon and at grave cost. How appripos Percy has Lance mouth words typical of the novelist. You know he sympathizes with him-- in fact he is the sort of person Percy feared he might have become, if not for his faith, yet the moralist makes Lance the personification of pure evil. The priest-confessor, his quite solemnity hovering throughout the novel, harkens to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, when Christ returned to view the modern world. The ideas here are so out of touch with our present Zeitgeist that most critics missed the central importance of this novel. One critic called it a brilliant "jeremiad." Lancelot is much more, and I pray the day comes when we recognize what Percy was saying.

This belongs in the highest tier of American fiction. Only Walker Percy could have distilled this masterpiece from the rotting Southern gentry and the moral rot of the life-is-just-a-movie generation. This suspenseful, funny, mesmerizing, brutalizing novel is the Love Song of Violent American Death that no Tarantino, no Stone, has ever come close to matching -- or ever will, because filmmakers who push the buttons of love and death are among the problems, the diseases, that Percy's Lancelot challenges to the joust. Read this and you will understand -- and shiver to understand -- the world's crusades. And possibly join one.