The Last Gentleman

This is actually my favorite Percy novel. While I believe the Moviegoer uses an excellent device, watching movies, to depict the alienation of the moder/post-modern man I identified much more closely with the engineer in this novel. Percy believed that boredom and a sense of disconnection were the ultimate products of the modernist agenda. I believe Barret perfectly describes the average denizen of modernity who doesn't know who he is, where he is going, or what he is for. Autobiographically, I grew up as a transplanted midwesterner in the deep south. What I loved so much about this novel is how much I could identify with the main character's sense of rootlessness.

Will Barrett is a confused young man. A drop-out, not only of Princeton, but basically of life in general, in this picaresque novel Barrett goes on a "spiritual quest" that takes him from NYC to his ancestral home in the Mississippi Delta to the desert around Santa Fe in search of answers on how to live. He falls in love with Kitty, encounters her family, faces ghosts from his own past, and breaks from his self-imposed stupor and acts. Will spends much of the novel observing: he views life through a telescope and spends a lot of time in front of a TV set. Gradually he learns to free himself from this bondage (he says he wanted to view life as a scientist might) and begins living life as a participant and not just as an observer. Will doesn't forget the value of contemplation and at the end of the novel is still a "watcher and listener," but by this stage has a better idea of who he is. Percy is a comic writer and many of the scenes are funny (and symbolic): the ending with Sutter Vaught and his Edsel is hilarious. Well written and searching, Percy's novel insists that people must reach out beyond themselves to find happiness and sanity.

Percy explores the need in each of us for authenticity- that highly allusive quality in a fragmented, uprooted time. He gives us Will Barrett- a modern day Prince Myshkin- who reveals the difficulty for anyone seeking a truly meaningful existence, made even more onerous by the times in which we live.Percy, however, was no tragedian. The novelist points the way toward hope; in fact, Will's rambling thoughts- by the sheer nature of his grappling- provide a key he will escape, or perhaps even better, transcend inauthenticity. Barret cannot verbalize this, but the novel's end makes you feel that Will is on his way.A tidier novel, one longed for by the Cambridge reader, demands less of Will than can be expected for him- or us, Percy is saying- to reach this plateau. This explains why in his critical essays Percy bemoaned the effect t.v. sitcoms and soap operas had in trivializing the essential strugggle that makes life real.

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.