This is a character-driven story, and Walker Percy is skilled in creating memorable characters. I suspect that this book would reward those who gave it a second or third reading. Indeed, the abrupt, but masterful ending encourages this. But I had to push myself to finish this book. The failing is mine, not Percy's. I am too impatient as a reader.

I ended my review of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree by adding almost as an afterthought that it is very funny. I’ll start this on Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman by saying it too is very funny. It’s slapstick and absurdist at times, satirical, iconoclastic, wickedly spurting out stereotypes, and if you like your humour refined it’s got that subtle taste of a Socratic Kierkegaard at glee. I’m only an Englishman eavesdropping on this tale of Southern gentility so for better or worse a lot has passed by me, but taking some sort of affinity with New Yorker miserableness as the nearest I can find to a stable reference point I’ll have a go at saying something about it which can be said without having a clue about the story and the importance of history in the development of The American Identity.

tIt’s theatrical, scenes straight from Anna Karenina, parks and gardens, actors, roles; literary, the first line of the novel beginning “One fine day in summer” reminding us of a certain autodidact in a recurrent existential fix or stuckness, and philosophical: diagonally opposite the aphorism from Kierkegaard, “If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much” in my edition is the Walker statement at the bottom of page 1, “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.” Any doubt that we are being set up to play with existentialism are dispelled by the introduction of a seriously neurotic and cookie psychotherapist of the existentialist school a few pages later.

tIt’s imagistic, photographic and cinematic, something I won’t spend too much time on, except to add ‘filmy’ to filmic as it’s important: reality comes and goes mistily as if there is a fog, some thick molecular wind that is still (Percy’s own repeated motif), and the central character suffers fugues, memory confusions of the most important intensity in his quixotic wayfaring searching for he knows not what. The central character, who turns out not to be the central character (because there are no centres, certainly not in his head) has a ‘nervous condition’ which is a euphemism if ever I heard one, or rather it’s a convenient label for classifying what is inconvenient; on a lesser level it’s simply the tension between being afraid of the social and wishing to be a part of it, the sort of stuff we have all read about.
A couple of examples before I leave the filmic to show how the imagery is a vehicle for the ideas. Lots of cars carrying people described in perfect detail, usually broken down or shabby though one particularly handsome specimen of an all-American campervan, but the car you choose is the person you is, or at least it comes to reflect you; cars and junkyards, roads and metal, iron against some dried up vegetation, nature and industry juxtaposing all the time so, for example, “ Outside in the still air, yellow as butter, the flat mathematical leaves of the aspen danced a Brownian dance in the sunlight, blown by a still molecular wind….(an) abstract, lustful molecular wind”. Mathematical, abstract, lustful: more later.

On a different level, there’s an hilarious moment where a character is on a college campus that has just been celebrating some sort of confederate federal event that has descended or ascended into a riot, and towards him come running a group carrying a flagpole that contains one or other of the flags. He avoids any direct lancing, but as the group turns, the arc the back of the pole makes catches him and knocks him out.
It’s about history too. Specifically, the reference points that the ‘engineer’ (the pseudo-name given to the character with the most lines) has upon the maps he carries with him are the crossed swords that mark battlegrounds from the war. Such co-ordinates provide him with a route to the past or at least to a root that may be a place where he can find what he’s grown into. Unfortunately, every place he arrives at is also the same place he leaves from immediately. He’s screamingly unable to locate anywhere, and nor is he able to settle with people who come as edges, flat, in role, members of a group: he finds the dark and dead beneath the cheery belonging of this group or that, this loyalist or that frat member. Curiously, extremely unusually, his only talent is for relating to an individual as a person. Very strangely, he seems to have some sort of ‘radar’ to connect on a purely personal level with people. Levinas or Buber would have been proud of him, but, hey, we’re supposed to be talking about the real world.

As I’ve said, the engineer isn’t the main character because the point is there are no main characters. Here comes the heavy bit, written as pompously as I can to parallel the parodic paradoxes of the text.
If he were the ‘engineer’, he would ‘be’ Wittgenstein, of course, stand for the great destroyer of philosophy who set out to do so in order that he could live an authentic, simple life. But that role is given to another ‘character’, the doctor/mortician/alcoholic Suter whose notebook was intended merely to “be rid of it, excreta, crap”. (Doctor-Mortician Walker Percy wields a scalpel). But there are no characters, just points of intersection.

The narrative tensions work to allow these points to inhabit various dialectical dynamics such as between freedom and necessity, abstraction and immanence, ‘lewdness’ and bourgeois sterility (the latter pair delightfully and comically constantly shifting face), self-enclosure and the dread of possibility. Also, of course, the doomed and preposterous pseudo-transcendent attempts to discover the final place of security, comfort and peace in this miserable world (In a line you can throw away like so much that happens in the imaginary world of this novel, the ‘engineer’ picks up a copy of Fromm’s ‘The Art of Loving’ that someone is reading: he puts it down again, remembering that it made him feel very good while he was reading it, but had absolutely no influence on his life).

Suter, a very obscure figure at first, comes into focus more and more as the novel progresses, becomes a fixation for the engineer who searches for ‘an answer’ without knowing the question . Fortunately the other ‘solid’ characters move more into the background apart from cameo roles, disperse into vagueness. I was particularly grateful to have little more of the awful Kitty. Suter gets all the best lines, is the locus of the pertinent dilemmas, imaged particularly in a harrowing description of the flesh torn off his face in a failed suicide attempt to reveal the skull beneath. His notebook, which accompanies the latter engineer, has some good pompous words of wisdom and insight, like all pompous and wise texts, but it’s the dismissal of these which provide what meaning the novel may be striving for.

This can’t be grasped until one considers the hideous transportings of the dying man-child Jamie’s decay into the ravages of a horrifyingly depicted death from lukaemia. As he lays dying, various ideologies hover malignantly around his body and soul. The dehumanised religious consolation matches the bureaucratic ‘care’ of hospitalisation. Distant voices vibrate with platitudes. His ending is grotesque and foul, much different from anything in the rest of the novel, more real if you like, the end point, the bringing home of the body in question. It also brings together the nature of a lewd Christendom that has become more pornographic the deeper it encloses itself in respectabilities, histories, pseudo-identity.

The book finishes on a supremely optimistic note, one that gave me a joy transcending the laughter of humour.

This is strange book. But. I chose it because I really liked The Moviegoer by the same author and heard this was somewhat of a modern rendition of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which I also read recently and enjoyed.

This book had its merits but unfortunately these were superseded but its often aimless meanderings and plot circumventions. I almost gave up more than once . . . but my compulsive bent to finish what I start won out in the end.

My low rating is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of the writing but of how little this style appealed to me for the most part.

Now I can celebrate its conclusion and move on to something more captivating.

This is the kind of book that was written to support an **idea** rather than to be a good book

I listened to three Walker Percy novels and tried so hard to appreciate him. I usually enjoy the first quarter or so of each book, in which Percy introduces his philosophical concerns and astutely puts his finger on some aspect of the spiritual illness of modern man. I'm with him there. Then he proceeds to completely lose me with zany, unfunny plots and characters I care close to nothing about. This one had a pretty interesting ending, I'll give it that.

I downloaded The Last Gentleman on iBooks having confused it in memory with Walker Percy’s sequel, The Second Coming. I read both thirty years in reverse order before soon after I married but forgot that detail. It took about 250 pages for me to realize my mistake. I remember being fond of both, but of one far more. It turns out, I preferred The Second Coming,.

The Last Gentleman is the book the sequel dreamed of becoming, which is why, I suspect, Percy felt compelled to return to familiar ground when his writing matured. Having said that, the book continues to charm thirty years later and while it isn’t Percy’s best, it merits reading. I would also add that, for readers not familiar with Percy, it may be a good launching point.

Percy builds his novel around the character of Bill Barrett, a southerner out of his place and time. He’s transplanted himself to New York in the sixties at the time of the civil rights upheavals, when Southerners have been forced (a century after the Civil War) to once again confront their racial and religious beliefs. He’s shortened his name from William Barriston and given up the colloquial nickname Bibb. His father, a well known lawyer, paradoxically killed himself with a shotgun on the eve of winning his most famous legal civil rights battle. As a consequence Barrett relocates to live an uneventful and, most believe, unfulfilled life working maintenance.

Barrett suffers fugue states, and may also suffer from borderline personality disorder. What he does best, however, is dissemble. He can walk into any group and take on their characteristics, so that they soon believe he is just like them. This is how the novel finally takes shape.

Barrett spies young Kitty Vaught in the park on afternoon and develops a vague attraction. He spends his afternoons looking for her and when he sees her again he stumbles into her family who is visiting her brother Jamie at the hospital where he is in remission from leukemia. This encounter leads to a job offer from Kitty’s father to keep Jamie company for the remaining days of his life.

From this point The Last Gentleman turns into a picaresque novel, with Barrett roaming the country trying to catch up with Jamie and the Vaughts as they travel cross-country. He encounters the enigmatic and suicidal father figure Sutter Vaught, as well as a menagerie of sixties personalties from the crusading nun, the emerging feminist and Kitty, whom he decides he wants to marry and who dissembles as well as he.

During Barrett’s travels he muses on the role his own beliefs play in his confused state, a level of confusion that becomes even more compromised when he stumbles across Sutter Vaught’s journals. The journals are filled with sixties existentialism, questions of immanence and transcendence. When he finally confronts Vaught, however, he finds Vaught unwilling to help. Vaught has withdrawn from the world has well.

This is perhaps the most unsatisfying element of The Last Gentleman. Percy has not yet reached the level of maturity as a writer that he knows how to tie the pieces together, and the ending is contrived and abrupt. It works at a superficial level, like a sugar pop, the way many such endings did in the sixties, but it really resolves nothing. I believe the elder Percy may have felt so too when he sat down to pen the far more satisfying sequel.

The ending doesn’t erase the charm, the grace and the complexity of the rest of the work. Reading these passages again I felt as much at home in the language as I did the first time, and, while I don’t agree with some of my writing teachers that language is everything, I do believe language is the highway on which we travel. Percy crafts beautiful prose, and more delightful characters—even the ones we encounter for one or two pages.

The Last Gentleman is not an arm chair cozy read. He expects us to think with him, and not feel comfortable with those thoughts. Reading Percy may take you into a fugue state of your own, but that’s okay. Because when you return you may find your understanding of the world has changed ever so slightly for the better.

“The task, he mused, was to give shape and substance to time itself”

This rings as true for myself as it is to will barrett.

I was troubled with how much I identified with Will at the beginning, which means I was horrified with how much I identified with sutter at the end.

4/5 stars.

This was a difficult read. I found that I struggled to understand the obviously philosophical musings of Will Barrett and Sutter. Yet, I slogged through it because I was sure that Walker Percy had something profound to say. I'm not sure what the whole point of the book is, but I found that individual statements throughout the book seemed to be clear sighted nuggets of truth. I'll probably have to re-read everything that I underlined to get a stronger sense of the overall theme.

5 stars for writing and body of literary work!!! I find myself frustrated with Will, the Vaughts and their wanderings. So much ambiguity over time is wearisome to me - but the writing is exquisite, and Percy's pen is magical and brilliant.

I read this at 17, but found that, ten years later, I couldn't remember it at all except for the opening scene in Central Park. I haven't changed that much in ten years. I just re-read it and really wanted to like it, took my time with it, trying to understand the metaphors and trying to picture the scenes in my mind - but I just didn't get much out of it. Maybe I'm not philosophical enough...
I do like the descriptions of Southern culture as a New Yorker with some Southern experience...

This book was placed on my To Read list so long ago that I no longer remember why it was added. The Last Gentleman follows displaced southerner Williston Bibb Barrett from New York City to Alabama to New Mexico as he falls in with a southern family loosely connected to his own southern roots. Barrett suffers from a "nervous condition" and experiences occasional losses of memory, deja vu, and "fugue states," accompanied by an overwhelming feeling that he is lost, or "dislocated" from the rest of the world. The overarching theme of Walker Percy's second novel appears to be what I have seen described elsewhere as Christian Existentialism, as Barrett's relationships throughout his physical journey south coincide with a personal quest for identity and purpose. Through Percy's characters, the reader is introduced to his philosophical quandaries regarding American and Southern culture, religion, faith, morality, identity, and death, but does so without preaching a gospel or pretending to have answers to any of the important questions. In fact, Percy might even admit to not knowing all of the questions. Definitely not a casual read, but a good read nonetheless.

It looks like the author wrote this long meandering story as a long meandering story because that was what all the cool writers were doing in 1960s America. And taking popular evangelizer decision, he wrote a story to convert 1960s atheists in the style that would actually get them to read it —modernist or post-modernist (like a Death in Venice).

I would have stopped reading it if not for Wikipedia and a Notre Dame article online giving me background on the author to see what this story was trying to do. But at the end of the book, I think I saw what ihe was getting at.

And Bonus! I I learned some new words like “grass widow” and historical items - like the Milk Fund in New York. Maybe because I’m not from New York or the South—or from te 1960s.

Thank you, local e-library for growing synapses.