[The Second Coming] is sad, sensual, self-pitying, and unresolved. It fails as a romance, fails as a character novel, fails as a confession, succeeds uncomfortably well as a stoical groan. One winces, and turns away, and then, because its irony dilutes the horror, reads on….

The plot of The Second Coming careens between Allison's endearing, doggerel madness … and Will's grim, crazed, suicidal gambit for a proof of God. One suspects Percy reined in his characters whenever their lively, stubborn self-interest overshadowed his relentless God-talk. Emotional drama shoved aside, Percy opts for melodrama….

Allison is less a character than a philosophical construct—one of Percy's "castaways" on an industrialized, amoral island who secretly combs the beach for sometime-true, sometime-false messages in bottles—so one is not unduly annoyed by the turn that a middle-aged depressive, who is eventually diagnosed as suffering from Hausmann's Syndrome (a pH and brain problem...