Blues in the New South

By Paul Gray

THE SECOND COMING by Walker Percy; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $12.95

The perception that the world gets crazier every day is not particularly new. It may not even be true. But the diverse people who hold this view have one thing in common: a good deal of spare time in which to muse. Novelist Walker Percy, 64, has made such free-floating contemplatives his trademark. From The Moviegoer (1961) on, his heroes have been thinking animals, unencumbered by the routines and demands of daily life. They are either feckless or rich.

The hero of The Second Coming, Percy's fifth novel, is emphatically both. Will Barrett is a middle-aged version of the younger character who starred in The Last Gentleman. He has inherited a fortune ("About 50 or 60 million," he guesses) from his late wife Marion. Retired early from his Wall Street law practice, he lives on his 10,000 mountainous acres in North Carolina, dabbles in his wife's philanthropies and plays a lot of golf. On the links, he has lately developed a nasty slice and the habit of blacking out and falling down. The problem is neurological, and something more. Percy writes: "There ... stands Will Barrett on the edge of a gorge in old Carolina, a talented agreeable wealthy man living in as pleasant an environment as one can imagine and yet who is thinking of putting a bullet in his brain."

Will's despair can be traced in part to a trick of memory. He realizes suddenly that the hunting accident he was involved in as a young boy was no such thing. His father, a thunderous Mississippian straight out of Faulkner, had vainly tried to kill both Will and himself. A later attempt at suicide succeeded, spurring Will to set out on a path as unlike his father's as possible: "God, just to get away from all that and live an ordinary mild mercantile money-making life, do mild sailing, mild poodle-walking, mild music-loving among mild good-natured folks." He sees now that "his little Yankee life had not worked after all," that his father tried to shoot him out of mercy rather than cruelty. The question posed by the old man's suicide remains unanswered; surrounded by physical comforts and loving friends, Will cannot find a reason to go on living.

Absolutist that he is, he devises a plan "to settle the question of God once and for all." He will go into a labyrinthian mountain cave and simply sit until he receives a sign. What he gets instead is a toothache, which drives him out of hiding and into the care of Allison, a young schizophrenic who has escaped from a sanitarium and is living in a greenhouse right beneath the cave. Emerging from his vigil, Will Barrett goes through the glass roof and literally falls in love.

Percy makes this preposterous coming together seem as natural and plausible as a handshake on the street. In all of its many convolutions, The Second Coming is a meticulously crafted narrative, unobtrusively folding the distant past into a busy present. Nobody writes about the New South of condominiums, shopping centers and doubleknits with more authority than Percy. Will meets a man who is about to sell his house in Georgia. He will then retire to the newfangled splendors of Carolina and "begin a new life in his garden home in Emerald Isle Estates, watch Monday-night football, do isometrics in the family room, drive to Highlands with his wife to attend Miami-style auctions." This milieu is perfect for pleasant shallow people like the young jumpsuited minister who invites Will to an ecumenical religious retreat: "A weekend with God in a wonderful setting ... That's the bottom line."

With remarks like that assailing him from all sides, no wonder Will goes crazy. Or does he? Percy writes that he "went mad" upon deciding to enter the cave, but the point is then oddly hedged: "This is how crazy he was. He had become convinced that the Last Days were at hand, that the world had fallen into the hands of the only species which knew how to destroy itself along with all other living creatures on earth, that whenever in history this species had invented a weapon, it had forthwith used it ..." The list continues, building a case against mankind that is hard to refute. Will's convictions may be overheated, but they are not insane.

The suspicion mounts that Percy is secretly on Will's side. This is unfortunate, because the character has some serious, unacknowledged flaws. He is remarkably cold to those around him; he goes into the cave shortly before his daughter's wedding and worries not a whit about missing it. Evidence for his sense of mor al superiority is not provided. He rants at unconscionable length, a voice crying out not in the wilderness but on the golf course or in his Mercedes. The effect of his diatribes is peculiar, as if Swift had put his most acid criticisms of society in the mouth of a Yahoo.

The novel survives the weakness of its hero because Percy is as genial and hu mane as Will is obsessed. While the character castigates the world, his creator renders it with loving care. The Second Coming engages the senses as well as the mind, hectoring sometimes, but entertaining all the way.

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