I started reading Walker Percy because he's what's known as a Catholic writer, which I suppose means a writer who creates a world where intimations of Christian dogma emerge realistically, and are not just superadded to the plot. The strength and appeal of the novel (as well as his first, The Moviegoer) is its depiction of the protagonist coming upon these intimations in a picaresque plot, full of humor and irony, with nary a hint of didacticism. The most interesting and positive character (Sutter) is a disdainful non-believer, though with an ironic respect for Christianity, and the protagonist remains unconverted at the end. It's a long novel, and while reading I wondered if it might be improved by more editing; but then again the leisurely pace and abundant detail contribute to the verisimilitude of the hero's search for meaning. This search coincided in many respects with my own, making it a very worthwhile book.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I enjoyed the story of the young engineer's journeys (both physical and emotional) but at times I found the writing style to be so convoluted that I had to re-read entire paragraphs to get the gist of what the author was saying. A tad too verbose for me.
Here is an example:
"It was possible for him to be at home in the North because the North was homeless. There are many things worse than being homeless in a homeless place - in fact, this is one condition of being at home, if you are yourself homeless. For example, it is much worse to be homeless and then to go home where everyone is at home and then still be homeless. The South was at home. Therefore his homelessness was much worse in the South because he had expected to find himself at home there."

Walker Percy is one of the great novelists of the South and is at his best when he describes quotidian life there. The protagonist, whom Percy shapes as an engineer, is the personification of the Deep South. The engineer is a Princeton man with a high-powered telescope living in New York City with episodes of amnesia or "fugues," which disorient him. This poor man takes a job caring for a desperately sick young man named Jamie and falls in love with his sister, Kitty. Jamie is receiving treatment in New York for his illness and the family wants to return from New York to their home in the South, inviting the engineer to accompany Jamie and drive him there. The experience of driving from New York into the South is well written and at times Percy reminded me of a Southern Saul Bellow -- brilliant, brainy, adept in the use of a straight-ahead narrative style. The theme of the novel is the way in which the artifice of our culture and religion is at odds with the realities of everyday existence. This enigmatic dialectic pervades the novel and is at the heart of the engineer's disorientation. The graphic closing pages of this novel are hard to read as Percy can be intensely vivid, which is both wonderful when life is good and tragic when life is painful -- but such is the plight of the last gentleman. I admired and cared about the gentlemanly character of the engineer struggling to find his way despite his sensitivity and disorientation. In fact, nearly all of the characters are fully drawn, highly nuanced figures about whom I cared. The writing style is gorgeous with obvious high marks for craftsmanship as it transported me with incredibly true-to-life dialogue based upon 14 years of living in the South. I loved the originality of the story line and its deeper currents as the writer worked hard in building this novel. The overall literary experience moved and even shook me in the intense denouement and its prominent place in readership in coming generations is assured.

Excellent meditation and meditative exploration of the nature of a disassociated manhood.
The reader has to feel afloat and fuzzy like the narrator-- Percy is an expert in creating mood.
(Not a well organized theory, but just a thought: This book is the secularized, Catholic-haunted, post-modern spiritual successor to Brideshead Revisited. It is as though Faulkner and Waugh were mashed up with Vonnegut to explore a family history and the orbit of an outsider caught in its pull.

Equal parts 5 stars of beauty and philosophical thought and 2-star tedium. But maybe he was using the characters & their actions to make the reader truly feel frustration and bewilderment instead of merely describing it & hoping it transferred from the page in concept only.

Christ, stick to The Moviegoer.

A man without qualities from the Deep South on a doubtful pilgrimage across the country, tackling some of the big issues along the way: How to deal with the captious workings of one’s own passivity in the face of historical turmoil? How to muster the moral strength to cross the road on a Wednesday afternoon? What is the metaphysical function of genital sex? Timeless questions.

This book, based in small part on Dostoevsky's The Idiot, is, is, is everything. The final pages will make you tremble or cry, or just appreciate how we kiss and kick around despair.

On paper this book is very foreign to me. The characters are southern, aristocratic, romantic, and even a little bit Greek. Even so, I liked it.

I feel like this book is a kind of attempt to write some of the 19th century Russian novels I’ve read in 20th century America.

The characters, especially the main one, are like Dostoyevsky’s in that they are unrealistic as individuals, but they represent the extreme parts of ourselves. I can keep up the suspension of disbelief not because people are really like that, but because parts of me are really like that. I’m a big fan of this style of character, and this book achieved a tolerable amount of success in conveying truths through these essential characters.

The ideas explored by the plot were much like those in Anna Karenina, but for a postwar American. I’m almost certain that was on purpose, for the parallels are many (love interest named Kitty, a dying brother, characters are unsure of religion’s place in their wealthy lives, and a central male character struggling with the sense of belonging) Honestly, that hit the spot for me. I’m sure that, literarily, Anna Karenina was better, but I enjoyed this book much more. It was like Anna Karenina but with only Levin’s story and not Anna’s. By focusing only on the Levin-type story, the Last Gentleman not only focuses more on what I’m interested in, but it is also about half as long, which is good because Anna Karenina was too long for my taste.

Overall, this book was pretty good, and has catalyzed a lot of important thoughts. I will award it only 4 stars for two reasons. 1) It did not quite achieve that Dostoyevsky-level character building, which it tried to imitate. No hard feelings though, because Dostoyevsky is tough to beat. 2) Lost in the Cosmos, another book of Walker Percy’s, is a more concise presentation of Percy’s ideas, albeit without a plot. If I ever recommend anything by Percy (which I’m likely to do, for he asks a lot of important questions), I will recommend Lost in the Cosmos instead of this. Percy’s strength is writing important things, rather than entertaining things, so Lost in the Cosmos is a better representation of him anyway.

This book provided occasional reading enjoyment, but it also seemed to take forever and ultimately, I really didn't get it.

This book featured a totally unlikeable character and I just gave up on it as unreadable!

This one didn't do it for me. There were some interesting trains of thought and ideas and some lovely description. Interesting that the main character suffers from mental issues and goes into spurts of amnesia and fugue states, but the way this is written is too difficult, cumbersome, annoying for the reader to follow. I did not relate to nor care for any of the characters. Or rather I did not feel emotionally invested in their journeys. The journey of the main character, the engineer, felt random. This plotless book teaches me the importance of including a plot in my fiction.