Some amusing parts but over all a ridiculous book to me. I am sorry I took the time to read it.

A fascinating premise for a book, and a classic.

I liked this book the first time I read it ten years ago, but it stuck me much more profoundly upon this recent re-reading. Percy tackles many issues in this book, all of which ultimately relate to how meaning and thus life itself can be possible in a demystified and inverted modern world. There is a fair amount of farce in The Last Gentleman, but it is farce in service of a serious purpose - the exploration of the absurdity of so much that is taken for granted. The path forward Percy suggests requires a merging of the immanent with the transcendent, In Percy's world this is what everyone is searching for, haltingly, wrongly even absurdly. But where this merging is found in its true and ultimate form there is yet hope.

Sept 2020 - Perhaps its a sign of the times, or just my growing appreciation for Dostoyevsky like “fantastic realism”, but I increasingly think that the farcical elements in Percy are more “real” than an attempt at straightforward realism could ever be.

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).

My expectations of classics probably weighed me down here. This is southern gothic similar to Faulkner. The story is not that impressive but the characters were just interesting enough to keep me going.

I found this book really hard going, in fact I shelved it for a couple of months. But I couldn't leave it and decided to plough on. This book has some awesome reviews, so perhaps it's just me, I just couldn't connect with it.

Will Barrett is a slacker. A Princeton drop-out from a genteel Alabama family, unable to attend to his studies, or his life really, because he has amnesiac spells, he moves to New York City where he gets a room at the YMCA and a job as "humidification engineer" at Macy's - basically a janitor working in the basement. It's the Eisenhower era. He spends $1,900 on a fancy telescope (that's about $966,000 in today's dollars) to watch a peregrine in Central Park, but ends up training it on two successive women on a park bench. He spies them writing notes to each other and leaving them in a crack in the bench, whereupon he reads the notes and replaces them. (Highly unethical.) The first woman is sturdy and athletic, the second one young and lovely. He immediately falls in love with her, then just happens to wander into a hospital, where he runs into her father. It turns out Mr. Vaught and his family are also from Alabama and knew Will's Daddy. Kitty is the daughter Will has fallen in love with. Her teenage brother Jamie has a bad case of the leukemia, and they pull him out of the hospital and take him home to die, but not before Will and Kitty have sex in Central Park. Mr. Vaught hires Will to be a companion to Jamie down South. Will, Kitty, and Jamie all enroll in the local university, Kitty joins Chi Omega, Will asks the obscenely wealthy Mr. Vaught for Kitty's hand in marriage, and Mr. Vaught agrees, even though Will is still a slacker and, with his amnesiac spells, borderline mentally ill, because when you are part of the same country club social class in Alabama any shortcomings are forgiven, apparently. A wrench is thrown into the family plans when lusty black sheep brother Sutter absconds with Jamie, taking him to New Mexico to die. Will is sent after them in the Trav-L-Aire.



This marks the second, and last novel of Percy's I will read. It tried my patience, and it wasn't even the 20 instances of nigger or niggers, or the instance when Percy channeled Henry James and a priest "hung fire." It's not even that I'm always irritated by slacker characters, or people wanting to marry the first person they think they've fallen in love with at age 21, although I usually am. It's some combination of all these things, plus the way Percy called Will "the engineer" rather than his name, plus the Southern gothic atmosphere and the endless peregrinations, pointless except in the way they direct our attention to and reinforce the overall existential malaise.

Percy got lazy with his adverbs and adjectives in the last 100 pages, where "the engineer" said something "gloomily" about 30 times, and was constantly "puzzled."

My 1978 edition's cover illustration was anachronistic, featuring a man dressed in the clothes of a 70s scholar, with late 70s shoes. Those shoes were not available in the Eisenhower era.

There was one sentence I liked:

The engineer, on the other hand, read books of great particularity, such as English detective stories, especially the sort which, answering a need of the Anglo-Saxon soul, depict the hero as perfectly disguised or perfectly hidden, holed up maybe in the woods of Somerset, actually hiding for days at a time in a burrow of ingenious construction from which he could notice things, observe the farmhouse below.

Then there was this:

A Southerner looks at a Negro twice: once when he is a child and sees his nurse for the first time; second, when he is dying and there is a Negro with him to change his bedcothes. But he does not look at him during the sixty years in between.

Which is instructive as far as it goes, except that both Will and his father, and Kitty's sister Val, a nun doing charity work among the Negroes, contradict it.

I also liked this evocative physical description (often my favorite part of any narrative):

Down flew the Trav-L-Aire into the setting sun, down and out of the last of the ancient and impoverished South of red hills and Cardui signs and God-is-Love crosses. Down through humpy sugarloaves and loess cliffs sliced through like poundcake. Dead trees shrouded in kudzu vines reared up like old women. Down and out at last and onto the vast prodigal plain of the Delta, stretching away misty and fecund into the October haze. The land hummed and simmered in its own richness. Picking was still going on, great $25,000 McCormicks and Farmalls browsing up and down the cotton rows. Bugs zoomed and splashed amber against the windshield; the Trav-L-Aire pushed like a boat through the heavy air and the rich protein smells, now the sweet ferment of alfalfa, now the smell of cottonseed meal rich as ham in the kitchen. There had been the sense ever since leaving New York and never quite realized until now of tarrying in upland places and along intermediate slopes and way stations...and now at last of coming sock down to the ultimate alluvial floor, the black teeming Ur-plain. He stopped the Trav-L-Aire and got out. Buzzards circled, leaning into the heavy mothering air, three, four tiers of buzzards riding round a mile-high chimney of air. A shrike, the Negro's ghost bird, sat on a telephone wire and looked at him through its black mask. It was a heedless prodigal land, the ditches rank and befouled, weeds growing through the junk: old Maytags, Coke machines, and a Hudson Supersix pushed off into a turnrow and sprouting a crop all its own. But across the ditches and over the turnrows - here they got down to business - stretched furrows of sifted mealy earth clean as a Japanese garden but forty miles long and going away, straight as a ruler, into the smoky distance. The cotton leaves were a dusky gray-green, as dusky as new money. Cotton wagons were on the road and the gins were humming. The little towns were squalid and rich. From the storefronts, tin roofs sagged across the sidewalk to the muddy Cadillacs. Across the road from a decaying mustard-colored I.C. depot stretched a line of great glittering harvesters and pickers parked in echelon like a squadron of Sherman tanks.

Written in 1966, Percy's second novel following the classic "The Moviegoer." Young, confused Southerner, adrift, suffering 60's-style existential angst, a blank slate whose "radar" lets him know what others want him to be. A vehicle for Percy's ideas on philosophy, theology, the South and more. I suffered existential angst trying to get through it.

I had to force myself to finish this book. Although the occasional lyrical flourish kept me reading, wondering where and when the next would occur, and made it worthwhile, I didn’t like a single character and the plot was absurd. But I guess that’s Percy’s point, so from that standpoint, it succeeded. Yawn.

I've enjoyed Walker Percy before, although I confess I do find him elusive. It's often hard to figure out where he's going or what he's getting at. Then, every once in a while, he hits you with a paragraph of pure gold, commenting on life, culture, history, the south, morality, or whatever it is he was chasing at that moment.

The Last Gentleman was the hardest read for me. It had the "contemporary malaise" that I've learned is the theme of his unofficial trilogy (Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins). This novel came out in the middle and was like "chasing a shadow" (Kirkus Reviews). At times I was riveted, at others I couldn't get going or find the rhythm.

Perhaps that's the point?

In any case, I couldn't shake the feeling that this book was over my head and I didn't understand what was really going on. The different characters of the Vaught family were well crafted but the cynicism behind them all was depressing. I believe that too, was the point...

I call it a classic, even though, I presume, it does not have the name recognition (of "The Great Gatsby" for example), in part because of it's exploration and evocation of American identity.

I can't help but wonder whether or not it is a response to the Beat generation, though I confess that I have not read anything by them save Allen Ginsburg's "Howl."

I wish Percy would have shed more light or expanded on Will Barrett's relationship with his father, his father's relationship to the community, and the effect of Will's father's death on Will. But leaving it hazy perhaps added more to the work than took away from it.

I was not impressed with the ending. It felt kind of flat.

This book was horrible. Granted, Percy's writing style makes me cringe and his dialog is tedious. I dreaded every page of this novel. Needless to say, I said a prayer of thanks when I finally finished it.

Walker Percy brings out the Southerner in me. I feel a visceral connection to his characters who are caught between the old and new South, despising the stupidity and evil of the old South but still deeply a part of the old South culture, wanting to see it replaced by something better, but finding the new South to be way less on many levels than a thinker and a dreamer like Walker Percy (and myself in my better moments) would wish.

Will Barrett starts this story as a classic fish out of water Southerner in New York, but he is a parody of the archetypal character in this situation, not a struggling writer living in a garrett finding a way to bring the glories of the old South to the page among a cencacle of equally brilliant struggling young geniuses. Instead, he is a mentally ill janitor, living in the YMCA and working in Macy's basement, while blowing the last of his meager inheritance on a telescope, not so as to look at the stars but to get a better view of the people. He is soon caught up with the Vaught family and pulled back against his will to his native South.

Will is a Southern Prince Myshkin -- an idiot who is not an idiot, who brings out the best in people, and who at times is almost a Christ figure. He is the only one among the Vaughts who manages to maintain a middle ground -- The father embodies the worst of the old South combined with the worst of the new; Sutter rebels against his upbringing with a rationality that is deeply spiritual, Val with a spirituality that is deeply rational, Kitty by yoyoing back and forth and Jamie by dying.

It is interesting to see how Will is the logical next step beyond Binx Bolling of "The Moviegoer," who finds enlightenment through vagueness; Will instead finds enlightenment through mental illness.

There is a lot of interesting philosophical discussion in this book, with some of the most interesting material coming from Sutter, but I couldn't help feeling that we aren't supposed to take any of it seriously. Even Sutter doesn't take himself seriously and openly rejects his writings when Will tries to talk about them. Instead it seems that true enlightenment is available only by finding the sweet middle ground that Will occupies or perhaps by dying like Jamie.