Though Walker Percy has always been a critic of how twentieth-century Americans live, and though The Second Coming, his fifth novel, continues this critique, this new work attempts in much greater detail than before to accentuate the positive: to explore, with great imaginative joy, states in which human beings may live together with authenticity. The Second Coming especially harkens back to and develops those scenes in Percy's previous work where authentic, human community occurs: a few conversations between Binx Bolling and Kate Cutrer in The Moviegoer (1961); the fleeting gesture of solidarity between Will Barrett and Sutter Vaught at the end of The Last Gentleman (1966); the epilogue to Love in the Ruins (1971), in which Tom More enjoys a family Christmas; and the mad-house visions of a peaceful life in the Shenandoah Valley of Lance Lamar in Lancelot (1977). The Second Coming continues the troubled life of Will Barrett; it explores and defines a "tertium quid," as Will calls it, between the extremes of suicide and mindless living which American society habitually offers in Percy's novels. (p. 471)
Percy's heroes invariably have to come to terms with the memory of their fathers; generally social misfits, like their sons, these fathers are often depressed individuals and sometimes suicidal. In The Second Coming, Will manages to remember what was hidden from us in The Last Gentleman: that his father attempted to kill his twelve-year-old son and himself several years before a second attempt on his own life was successful…. Percy's use of psychiatric models of behavior is always interesting. Will's acts of remembering recall the structure of psychoanalysis; it is only when he recovers the memory of what his father had tried to do that he is free to act. Yet Percy's principals must always pass beyond the various clinical helps offered to them—in this novel, therapy, shock treatments, and pills—for living in the future…. In Percy, salvation only occurs with the advent of the other, the right person, the friend or lover, whose subjectivity is eternally and irreducibly hostile to empirical analysis. However clinically ill the subjects who relate to one another may be, intersubjectivity is the purpose of their existence. An unabashed, tendentious romantic, Percy also has the great ability to construct scenes, especially in this novel, where intersubjectivity becomes so real it hurts.
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