Kieran Quinlan
Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Pp. 242. $35.00

John F. Desmond
At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy
Troy, NY: Whitston, 1997. Pp. 148. $22.50
Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel

Critics of Walker Percy tend to place his writings in one of three categories: he usually appears as shaped by the Southern tradition, as a semiotician with a novelistic bent, or as a Catholic. Particularly in the last few years, Percy criticism has focused increasingly on the religious element in his novels.

Kieran Quinlan, professor of English in Percy’s birthplace of Birmingham, Alabama, attempts to subsume Percy’s whole career under the heading Catholic: “Catholicism is an ideology that for good and for bad has determined Percy’s attitudes on far more issues-about human life, culture, race, gender-than is initially apparent and, as such, its influence needs to be exposed” (8-9). Consequently, Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist presents a reading of Percy’s fiction as well as of his essays from the premise that these texts served primarily as expositions of Catholic values. In fact, Quinlan sees the convert Percy as “engaged in a quasi-missionary effort on behalf of his newfound beliefs” (53).

Quinlan proceeds to present a brief tour of Percy’s life and career, interpreting the texts as demonstrations of his assumption that Percy expressed not just the views of Catholic doctrine but specifically “the kind of Catholicism that Percy embraced in the late 1940s” (5). The project leaves the reader rather dissatisfied. While any reader of Percy will readily agree to the importance of Catholicism for these texts, Quinlan’s argument seems overly reductive. The brevity of the study-and particularly the merely cursory glance given to novels such as Lancelot and The Thanatos Syndrome-indicates that Quinlan’s argument can barely be held up by Percy’s fiction. Quinlan is-understandably-much more comfortable talking about those essays in which Percy expressly addresses religious questions and leaves no doubt abut the relevance of a very conservative interpretation of Catholicism for his personal views.

Frequently the impression arises that Quinlan uses only those aspects of the novels that fit his scheme and disregards whatever else the books may contain, thereby running the risk of misrepresentation. His discussion of Lancelot, one of the central texts in Percy’s oeuvre, can serve as example. In Quinlan’s reading, Lancelot-a long monologue by a man who has killed his adulterous wife and burned down his plantation-becomes a novel about the confirmation of conservative Catholic views. Quinlan even manages to utilize the novel’s final vision for his purpose. Lancelot’s idea of starting a new society based on a quasi-Fascist-Puritan ideology is reinterpreted as “a sterner form of religious belief that is really a combination of ancient Stoicism and militant Counter Reformation Catholicism” (159).

Quinlan seems quite clearly too strongly bound by his claim that “with Percy philosophy and fiction are always a prelude to religion” (212). Since the end point of Percy’s argument is supposedly clear, Quinlan takes too many shortcuts to reach that end and hence does not give the texts their due consideration.

A more rounded view of Percy’s oeuvre can be found in John F. Desmond’s At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy. Desmond, president of the Walker Percy Society, collected nine essays on Percy that he published between 1986 and 1995 and added three new ones. Rather than present a cumulative survey of Percy’s works, the essays highlight individual aspects of the writings and yet provide a coherent picture: “His novels and essays serve as crossroads or points of intersection where the main lines of intellectual and moral concern converge and focus on a central question: How can human beings live authentically in the twentieth century?” (1).

Rather than set out to demonstrate the relevance of a conviction presented a priori, Desmond allows his answers to various questions to converge for more general statements regarding Walker Percy’s literary, philosophical, and religious concerns. Desmond’s discussion of Lancelot may serve to counterpoint Quinlan’s. Discussing Percy’s novel in conjunction with Albert Camus’s The Fall, Desmond suggests that “Camus’s novel pushed him in Lancelot to question and find a justification for both his own religious belief and his practice as a moralist writer” (76). The difference between the approaches becomes obvious: Where Desmond reads Percy as a developing writer and thinker, Quinlan relegates him to a static role increasingly out of touch with his modernizing times.

At the Crossroads also succeeds in placing Percy’s writing in the context of twentieth-century literature. Desmond draws for comparison not only on the aforementioned Albert Camus but refers also to T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Don DeLillo to demonstrate Percy’s place in modern writing. Slim as Desmond’s book is, it is much more informative about Walker Percy’s writing than Quinlan’s book.