Walker Percy, The Last Catholic Novelist

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Kieran Quinlan

—An iconoclastic inquiry into the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Percy's works.

In this study, Kieran Quinlan examines the theological principles and religious views that motivate Walker Percy's writing, primarily his belief in the validity and efficacy of the Roman Catholic faith, and offers some new and controversial conclusions.

Quinlan grounds the writer's concerns squarely in the context of the intellectual milieu of the 1940s, citing the influence of Jacques Maritain's The Dream of Descarte and the conversions of prominent contemporaries. He follows the future novelist through the events that would mold his sensibility: his father's suicide in 1929; his rearing by William Alexander Percy; and his contraction of tuberculosis and subsequent long convalescence. With a mind keenly attuned to philosophical nuances and an impressive grasp of semiotics and theology, Quinlan then deftly presents close readings of the novels, from the muted Catholicism of The Moviegoer to the explicit agendas of The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, and The Thanatos Syndrome. He shows how Percy contrasts Catholicism with Stoicism in Lancelot and The Second Coming. Quinlan also sheds light on the dense and often abstruse arguments of the philosophical essays, asserting that Percy, despite his early attention to existentialism, was actually a neo-Thomist rationalist who rejected Kierkegaard's irrational "leap of faith".

Quinlan presents here a searching, lucidly written examination of a spiritual pilgrim whose vision of the world, he finally maintains, is no longer tenable (thus making Percy "the last Catholic novelist") yet is admirable in its steadfast dignity. It is a book that is sure to arouse controversy and debate in our understanding of such an important contemporary novelist.

Kieran Quinlan is associate professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith.

Publication Date: 1996

Pages: 256