The Second Coming contains enough plot for three ordinary novels, sufficient themes for a dozen, and enough archetypal symbolism and mythopoeic incident to employ a busy Jungian researcher for a decade. Though the characters, especially the minor ones, are shrewdly observed and portrayed, they give the impression of having been created less for their own sake—or the story's sake—than for the beliefs, attitudes, and, above all, the follies which they represent. Through them and through W...

[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 li...

The situation of [Walker Percy's] The Second Coming is not new: the despair of an affluent, white, middle-aged man. But the novel's tone is beautiful in a way that little writing is now—sad and questioning, ironic, weary, and, finally, triumphant. Sadness and emptiness are difficult tones to achieve in fiction, and sometimes Percy bogs down in detail. But the reward of his effort (and the reader's, for it is a difficult book) is a genuine sweetness—mordant, touching, fragi...