My keen admiration for Walker Percy's fiction always has been menaced around the edges by the fact that in each of his books there are at least three or four occasions when his writing tends to drive me up the wall to one distance or another; in the case of his last novel, Lancelot, I stayed up there pretty much throughout.

It isn't that Percy ever writes really badly (though he is susceptible to sporadic attacks of damaging influence from Faulkner) but that at certain times he tends to write distractedly, skitteringly, seeming to lose sight momentarily of what he is supposed to be shaping. If the novel is the most open and accommodating of forms, Percy takes every advantage of that, throwing in chunks of perception or observation regardless of what they do to his narratives or characterizations, indulging, at the expense of cohesion and continuity, his...