I downloaded The Last Gentleman on iBooks having confused it in memory with Walker Percy’s sequel, The Second Coming. I read both thirty years in reverse order before soon after I married but forgot that detail. It took about 250 pages for me to realize my mistake. I remember being fond of both, but of one far more. It turns out, I preferred The Second Coming,.The Last Gentleman is the book the sequel dreamed of becoming, which is why, I suspect, Percy felt compelled to return to familiar ground when his writing matured. Having said that, the book continues to charm thirty years later and while it isn’t Percy’s best, it merits reading. I would also add that, for readers not familiar with Percy, it may be a good launching point.Percy builds his novel around the character of Bill Barrett, a southerner out of his place and time. He’s transplanted himself to New York in the sixties at the time of the civil rights upheavals, when Southerners have been forced (a century after the Civil War) to once again confront their racial and religious beliefs. He’s shortened his name from William Barriston and given up the colloquial nickname Bibb. His father, a well known lawyer, paradoxically killed himself with a shotgun on the eve of winning his most famous legal civil rights battle. As a consequence Barrett relocates to live an uneventful and, most believe, unfulfilled life working maintenance.Barrett suffers fugue states, and may also suffer from borderline personality disorder. What he does best, however, is dissemble. He can walk into any group and take on their characteristics, so that they soon believe he is just like them. This is how the novel finally takes shape. Barrett spies young Kitty Vaught in the park on afternoon and develops a vague attraction. He spends his afternoons looking for her and when he sees her again he stumbles into her family who is visiting her brother Jamie at the hospital where he is in remission from leukemia. This encounter leads to a job offer from Kitty’s father to keep Jamie company for the remaining days of his life.From this point The Last Gentleman turns into a picaresque novel, with Barrett roaming the country trying to catch up with Jamie and the Vaughts as they travel cross-country. He encounters the enigmatic and suicidal father figure Sutter Vaught, as well as a menagerie of sixties personalties from the crusading nun, the emerging feminist and Kitty, whom he decides he wants to marry and who dissembles as well as he.During Barrett’s travels he muses on the role his own beliefs play in his confused state, a level of confusion that becomes even more compromised when he stumbles across Sutter Vaught’s journals. The journals are filled with sixties existentialism, questions of immanence and transcendence. When he finally confronts Vaught, however, he finds Vaught unwilling to help. Vaught has withdrawn from the world has well.This is perhaps the most unsatisfying element of The Last Gentleman. Percy has not yet reached the level of maturity as a writer that he knows how to tie the pieces together, and the ending is contrived and abrupt. It works at a superficial level, like a sugar pop, the way many such endings did in the sixties, but it really resolves nothing. I believe the elder Percy may have felt so too when he sat down to pen the far more satisfying sequel.The ending doesn’t erase the charm, the grace and the complexity of the rest of the work. Reading these passages again I felt as much at home in the language as I did the first time, and, while I don’t agree with some of my writing teachers that language is everything, I do believe language is the highway on which we travel. Percy crafts beautiful prose, and more delightful characters—even the ones we encounter for one or two pages.The Last Gentleman is not an arm chair cozy read. He expects us to think with him, and not feel comfortable with those thoughts. Reading Percy may take you into a fugue state of your own, but that’s okay. Because when you return you may find your understanding of the world has changed ever so slightly for the better.
This was my first Percy, and it was by turns compelling and infuriating, much like The Idiot upon which it is loosely based. I didn't know anything about the book before I selected the unjacketed copy from the shelf at my local library, nor much about the author, save for what Charles Barber had to say about him during a recent reading on Book TV. My library is woefully understocked (though you can be sure they have every title for every lousy mystery writer from the last 50 years), and even for this regionally local writer they had only two titles - The Thanatos Syndrome, which Barber had mentioned, and The Last Gentleman. So I picked up the latter and read the first page and was instantly interested to see where it would lead, seeing as how the story opens in a place I know all too well, and spends the most part of its course in a place where I am unfortunately located at the present. So it's one of those uncanny deals where a book seems to call you out and make you rethink the unlikelihood of your own experience. Honestly, I don't know where Oates gets the comparison with Camus, and Faulkner is a superficial likeness. My sense was of a cross between Flannery O'Connor and Philip K. Dick, though the latter is probably due more to the comments made by Barber about the Thanatos Syndrome. Maybe Barry Hannah is a better clue, as I couldn't help but think of the title character in Ray when I encountered the young doctor Sutter in TLG. But it's pretty clear throughout that Percy has a thing for the Russians, and though The Idiot is certainly immanent, I find myself thinking of Anna Karenina now that I'm finished. Will Barrett is as much Levin as Myshkin, and Kitty is Kitty, at least by name. [a few days after finishing, I also find myself speculating as to whether Percy intends to remind us of Huck Finn, replacing Jim with Jamie and the photographer who pulls the racial passing stunt, the raft with the camper, the river with the road and Cairo with Ithaca. Both Huck and Barrett's fathers killed themselves, and each is confronting the problem of freedom as he understands it.]I thought Percy did an admirable job with the problem of 'potentiality' as Barret suffers it, or 'transcendence grasping for immanence' as Sutter likes to put it. I don't think it's as distinctly a Southern peculiarity as he would have us believe, but then I think he presents it as such for the benefit of Southerners, who are readily flattered in this way, and leaves the rest of us to put two and two together. The other characters are pretty spot on. They may seem like caricatures, but damn if I don't know people exactly like the Voughts. The thing that especially gets me about the book is that it doesn't really seem all that dated, though it's from the 60's. The region and the people Percy portrays are unlikely, in my mind, to be going anywhere anytime soon. They might even be getting prevalent, 'winning' as Barrett's father seemed to understand.
What do You think about The Last Gentleman (1999)?
There was a natural cadence to the dialogues in "The Last Gentleman" that felt like eavesdropping on actual conversations; these proved to be the most enjoyable parts of the novel for me. However, the descriptive passages seemed to extend on into dreamy unintelligibility, almost as if Percy's thoughts started to run away with themselves while he was writing. I noticed both of these qualities while reading "The Moviegoer," which I feel is the superior work, and though I appreciate the former more than latter, both contribute to a style that is uniquely Percy's. NB: Percy frequently describes the smells of the South as "ham-rich" or "rich as ham," which leads me to conclude that the reason for the high rates of obesity in that region of the country is the constant smell of pork products! Mmmm, bacon...algghhhhh.
—Elliott
I'm going to be EXTREMELY generous and give a book I couldn't take past page 108 (where the sex scene in Central Park begins, or maybe failed sex scene, I give no shits) two stars. Why? Because the "engineer" is admittedly a very haunting character in certain respects. Life going nowhere because of neurosis and the inability to actually choose a path in life instead of wallowing in potential? God, the man is writing about me. Kind of. I wish I had a plantation and a check every month, however modest.Unfortunately, the book is- rife with annoying generalist musings about the nature of life, the South, mental illness, blah, blah, blah;- populated by characters who all feel flat and artificial and one suspects all have the same palette of mental illnesses;- clearly going nowhere fast. My brother has a hockey card as a bookmark halfway through the book on the page with a passage that I will loosely quote: "Some days Kitty got a hangnail, and they spent the time looking for bandages and alcohol and nail scissors." Tons to look forward to!Between Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and now Walker Percy, I am off mid-twentieth-century literary fiction for a while. Life is too damn short to read about meaningless middle class lost souls wandering through life having pointless affairs and dabbling in trifles.
—Paul
Walker Percy is one of the great novelists of the South and is at his best when he describes quotidian life there. The protagonist, whom Percy shapes as an engineer, is the personification of the Deep South. The engineer is a Princeton man with a high-powered telescope living in New York City with episodes of amnesia or "fugues," which disorient him. This poor man takes a job caring for a desperately sick young man named Jamie and falls in love with his sister, Kitty. Jamie is receiving treatment in New York for his illness and the family wants to return from New York to their home in the South, inviting the engineer to accompany Jamie and drive him there. The experience of driving from New York into the South is well written and at times Percy reminded me of a Southern Saul Bellow -- brilliant, brainy, adept in the use of a straight-ahead narrative style. The theme of the novel is the way in which the artifice of our culture and religion is at odds with the realities of everyday existence. This enigmatic dialectic pervades the novel and is at the heart of the engineer's disorientation. The graphic closing pages of this novel are hard to read as Percy can be intensely vivid, which is both wonderful when life is good and tragic when life is painful -- but such is the plight of the last gentleman. I admired and cared about the gentlemanly character of the engineer struggling to find his way despite his sensitivity and disorientation. In fact, nearly all of the characters are fully drawn, highly nuanced figures about whom I cared. The writing style is gorgeous with obvious high marks for craftsmanship as it transported me with incredibly true-to-life dialogue based upon 14 years of living in the South. I loved the originality of the story line and its deeper currents as the writer worked hard in building this novel. The overall literary experience moved and even shook me in the intense denouement and its prominent place in readership in coming generations is assured.
—David Lentz
