Read the whole thing for the reward of the last 20 pages --a true and honest depiction of the moments just prior to death after a prolonged illness. What will you do with your life? What will you do with your death? There's a lot to think on here: memory, identity, recognizing who we are and our place in the world, home and not-home. Challenging, but worthwhile.

Two things marked this book for me. First, it seems to be a Southern Catcher in the Rye, which it followed by 15 years. Knowing about Percy's life as an existentialist, a man of faith, and one who struggled against depression helped the book make sense to me. A young white Southerner, a dropout from Princeton caught in New York in the wrong place and time, serendipitously falls in with a classic Southern family and is launched on a journey with no destination the hero can see, but one he may hope for. In his heart, he is caught between drifting through life afloat on its meaninglessness or choosing a conventional and respectable life with wife, wealth and community status. Percy, an early outspoken foe of segregation, also depicts the conventional view of the 50's and 60's in the South towards American blacks and does so with a clarity of description that can only come from having lived the scenes he gives us. Not considered his best book, the work is nevertheless an excellent story and one that reflects well the time of its writing.

this is, i suppose, the confusion of the modern american south. though dated already, and a smaller world than any i can really imagine. i would have liked this more if i had more inclination to feel something for the grand families in collapse, but i think i was more interested in the odd details than the sweep.

It drags towards the end

I really didn’t like his book. I’m not even sure what I think of it. I finished it simply because I was 200+ pages in before I realized I really didn’t like it, and I’ve always struggled with a compulsion to finish books once I’ve started them. Does that make me, in my own small neurosis, a bit like the engineer? A bit of a Will Barrett? I don’t fantasize about ravening particles or suspect every person I meet to know something I don’t know, something fundamental.

I do see that his father’s suicide traumatized him, but I’m not clear on how his odd relationships with the Vaught family, Sutter in particular, helped him find a way out of the fugue of that trauma. A wake up call? He could keep going and end up like Sutter or Val. He simply decided not to throw his life away as Sutter had done or waste in in pursuit of some perverse, sham “truth” like Val? They’re not likable characters, but is Percy suggesting that any search for truth or purpose or meaning inevitably makes us such fools? I don’t think so—the priest at the end seems wholesome and steady enough.

Now I really do feel more than a bit like Barrett. I can’t get a bead on this story; intuition fails me, and I can’t quite fathom it. Is there something Percy knows that I don’t know? If so, like Sutter, he’s cagey, refusing simply to tell me. Perhaps the bigger question: do I even need to know it?

Walker Percy's second novel also picaresque Southern gentleman's look at the world going on around him as he tries to fit in while making sense. It's a straight telling with stable plot points well limned but always from the unreliable narrator Will Barret who with bouts of deja vus and/or fugues where amnesia leaves holes to memory yet takes us through a series of events beginning in New York city parks on into the deep south in or about the mid-to late sixties or so frame. There is an interesting story here unfolding and the characters keep building the gothic column unto death's presence giving in to life's resistant pull. There's some canny verisimilitude some parallel furls to the "Glass family" as in J.D.'s Buddy telling all about big bro Seymour of the Bannanafish sort of banks into Sutter oldest son here of semi-genius spouting existential inanities and well thought deviances' but anyway concomitant familial mash. Also some "Scent of a Woman" hints here/there cathartic moments life/death struggle. But it goes on, there's a sequel come after two other novels between (have read them both not reviewed) "The Second Coming" - will wait to finish that before a review capturing thoughts from both. [...] till then...

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Will Barrett accidentally inserts himself into the affairs of a southern family, The Vaughts. He leaves New York to join them in his childhood home of Alabama, and a romp across much of the south ensues.

Colorful characters, and as far as I can tell each represents a way of answering the basic existential question (meaning/point of life), which is troubling the protagonist (who is reminiscent of the protagonist in Percy’s The Moviegoer). The question is particularly pertinent since the context is the terminal illness of the young Jamie Vaught. Is the meaning of life hedonism justified through science? Wealth? Charity? Religion? The characters represent these positions, while at times mocking them. Or are themselves mockeries of them.

I could be totally wrong on this interpretation, but that’s what it seemed like to me. I’m sure there’s depth here I didn’t pick up on, but it will give you much to ponder. And in terms of just putting one word in front of the next Percy is as good as anyone.

Having recently reread Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, I was looking forward to his second foray into the world of the novel. In many ways I was not disappointed. We meet on the first page, an immature Will Barrett, who has spent five years in psychoanalysis; he is a native southerner serving as a “humidification engineer” at Macy’s department store in New York City. An introspective educated man, vaguely aware of his own despair, Barrett is “dislocated in the universe.” Percy’s opening description of Barrett introduces his character: “He had to know everything before he could do anything. . . For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of a man he was or what he must do,".

His paralysis toward commitment to abstract knowledge before making decisions leads Barrett to world pervaded by ordinariness. He despairs of clear answers to his nagging questions about the purpose of life—both for himself and others—but he has some dim hopes that his quest will eventually bear fruit.

One day, as he contemplates his station in life while at Central Park, he opts to become, as Binx Bolling had in The Moviegoer, an observer and not merely the observed. He spots a beautiful young woman, Kitty Vaught, through his newly purchased telescope and sets out to meet her. Smitten, Barrett traces her to a New York hospital, where he discovers that she and the Vaught family are comforting her younger brother, Jamie, who is dying. In a somewhat improbable sequence of events, Will Barrett’s southern charm and gentlemanly pose win over each of the Vaught family members, and he is invited to accompany them back home to Atlanta, mostly as companion and confidant to Jamie as he lives out his remaining days. Barrett agrees, interested as he is in staying as close to Kitty Vaught as possible.

During his stay, Kitty’s sister, Valentine, who has joined a Catholic order of nuns that takes care of indigent children, enters Barrett’s life and coerces him to seek Jamie’s conversion, believing that he alone can ensure that Jamie enters eternity as a “saved” person. Soon thereafter, Sutter Vaught, Jamie’s brother, arrives on the scene. Barrett finds in him a curious but appealing sense of daring and courage. He seems to be someone who has lived life and not merely hypothesized about it.

Sutter and Jamie disappear, and it becomes Barrett’s duty to track them down and return Jamie home—a task made all the more alarming and tenuous when Barrett discovers in Sutter’s New Mexico apartment, along with some helpful maps, a stenographic notebook recording Sutter’s jaded outlook on life and community. Barrett familiarizes himself with the notebook during his subsequent trek, as Percy interweaves excerpts from Sutter’s painful explorations with Barrett’s unfolding search for the two brothers. Percy pushes the reader to diagnose the debilitating malady from which both Sutter and Barrett suffer: an utter sense of homelessness in the world that seems to make errant materialism or suicide the only options for the thoughtful individual.

Sutter’s notebook contains some key observations. If man is a wayfarer, he never stops anywhere long enough to hear that there is hope that conquers despair, salvation that conquers death. Will’s amnesia is not a symptom but the human condition: Man struggles to make the world anew at every moment; because he is ill-fitted for this Godlike task, it is not ennobling but pitiable. Sutter’s solution involves extremes of emotion and choice, as if they could somehow exalt a man to the stature necessary to reconstruct the world. Will, however, becomes a preserver of continuity growing from telescopic observer and wayfarer in a Trav-L-Aire named Ulysses, to comforter of a dying friend and agent of salvation for a living one.

Walker Percy takes ample opportunity to observe the passing scene. He wryly comments that though the North has never lost a war, Northerners have become solitary and withdrawn, as if ravaged by war. In sharp contrast, the South is invincibly happy. Will feels most homeless when he is among those who appear to be completely at home: “The happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.” Percy presents no simple solution to the plague of homelessness. If Will is to reenter the South and marry Kitty, he wants Sutter with him. Perhaps Will is still a wayfarer, yet in The Last Gentleman he has stayed around just long enough to hear something of the honest truth.

This book had a good begining, and at first reminded me a little of Ellison's Invisible Man in reverse (an amnesiac Southern White trying to come to terms with the South). Soon, however, the book becomes entangled in the happenings of a strange southern family, and all coherence stops. Characters say one things, then turn around and say the opposite; they continualy talk about having adventures, but nothing ever comes of it. The pace of the novel begins to feel a lot like a traffic jam: false start, sudden stop, false start, sudden stop. It was much too much like real life in that respect for my liking.

I must confess I didn't finish the book. At page 291, lacking the desire to continue and realizing that reading the thing had become a chore, I skipped to the end, which didn't restore my faith any.
I know that Walker Percy can write a good story, but in the case of The Last Gentleman it seems that he didn't.

This is my 2nd try at Walker Percy, the first being The Moviegoer, which won the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction and was on TIME's list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, and both have been 1 stars for me. As with The Moviegoer, the book is mostly existential nonsense. I can handle no plot if the dialogue is profound enough, but here it's not. I should have stopped with The Moviegoer.

Couldn't do it! I get reeled in by awards and accolades. Should I rate it? I don't know if that's fair since I didn't finish. I'm just glad I was strong enough to walk away! Not usually a quitter, but it was the right decision in this case!