Lancelot: A Novel [Paperback]

Walker Percy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 1999

Lancelot Lamar is a disenchanted lawyer who finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don't seem worth remembering. It all began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter, a discovery which sent Lancelot on modern quest to reverse the degeneration of America. Percy's novel reveals a shining knight for the modern age--a knight not of romance, but of revenge.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A funny and scarifying jeremiad . . . Easy to read and hard to forget."--Time

"Eloquent, reckless, hilarious . . . plunges forward through tawdry bedroom mysteries toward a final grand puzzle."--Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

"A modern knight-errant on a quest after evil.... Convincing and chilling." -The New York Times Book Review

"Eloquent, reckless, accurate, hilarious...plunges forward through tawdry bedroom mysteries toward a final grand puzzle." -Washington Post Book World

"A fine novel...Percy is a seductive writer attentive to sensuous detail, and such a skillful architect of fiction that the very discursiveness of his story informs it with energy and tension." -Newsweek

"A funny and scarifying jeremiad on the modern age. Lancelot is easy to read and hard to forget." -Time

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1 edition (September 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312243073
• ISBN-13: 978-0312243074
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Walker Percy (1916-1990) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he was the oldest of three brothers in an established Southern family that contained both a Civil War hero and a U.S. senator. Acclaimed for his poetic style and moving depictions of the alienation of modern American culture, Percy was the bestselling author of six fiction titles--including the classic novel The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the National Book Award--and fifteen works of nonfiction. In 2005, Time magazine named The Moviegoer one of the best English-language books published since 1923.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Percy, January 29, 2001

By 

Jonathan C. Owen - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lancelot: A Novel (Paperback)

This book is a conversation between Lancelot Lamar and Percival. Lancelot, once a member of New Orleans' landed gentry, is now confined to a mental institution. Percival is a priest who went to medical school, and has devoted his life to altruistic endeavors.

Lancelot was a "liberal" southern lawyer who validated his existence by working in civil rights litigation before a discovery that changed his life.

This discovery causes a great awakening. This theme of awakening is prominent in Percy's works. A character arrives at an existential moment in which he realizes that his life to this point has been as a dream: "Do you know what happened to me during the past twenty years? A gradual, ever so gradual, slipping away of my life into a kind of dream state in which finally I could not be sure that anything was happening at all. Perhaps nothing happened." As Lancelot retraces the events in this monologue, we watch the progress of his mental state, and his weighing of possible world views. His selection of a world view will determine his actions.

Another of Walker Percy's major literary themes is captured in an encounter between Lancelot and Elgin, a black MIT student. Lancelot mused, "Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life."

On another level, Lancelot is a southern white who has roiling feelings about women. His struggle to allow women to be sexual creatures is mirrored in his expressed feelings about his mother, then about his wife, Margot. The reader senses a that Lancelot's feelings toward women are a river of ambivalence. Curiously, this is similar to Pat Conroy's characters, whose southern white characters either lust after or endure their mother, depending on the moment.

If you like Walker Percy, you'll love this book. I do, and I recommend it.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Confidentially, It's Walker Percy's Best Book . . ., May 29, 2002

By 

Hunter Baker "Hunter Baker" (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lancelot: A Novel (Paperback)

After I read this book I had no choice but to immediately consume Walker Percy's novels. Reading Lancelot was like having the top of my head blown off and surviving the experience more awake and alive than ever. In an era where no one is really sure what they believe anymore, Percy sets out an interesting test. If you discovered clear evidence of evil, what would that tell you about the existence of good and maybe even God? I strongly suggest you take this journey and pay very close attention to the parallel travels of the main character's confidant, a priest-psychologist who is himself in crisis. If you do so, the ending will make the hairs stand up on the back on your neck.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I hope no one's forgotten that Lancelot is a nutcase, June 8, 1998

By 

Hal Johnson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lancelot (Mass Market Paperback)

Well, I can't deny that this is a great book, but it kind of worries me that certain other reviewers seem to be taking Lancelot's statements at face value...I mean, come on, the guy is a pretty awful person. Percy takes considerable pains to distance himself from the narrator, giving his name to Lance's audience and double (Perceval) instead.

Not that that madness diminishes the book. Lancelot's rants (which comprise the whole novel) are brilliant, though clearly mad; and the flashback nature of the plot lets Percy drop plenty of hints that something horrible has happened without giving away what it was (always a fun technique). The format of the book is an extended monologue, with Lance speaking to a silent Perceval. Some of the reminders of Perceval's physical presence (when Lance offers him a chair, for example, or reacts to something Perceval has supposedly said) can grow irritating, but they do build up to a wonderul ending. The Perceval of the grail legend remains silent too long, but that's a mistake he's not about to make twice.

Walker Percy only has two or three subjects he ever considers important enough to write about, and some readers might be sick of them by now, but Lancelot's madness gives Percy an opportunity to exaggerate and warp his usual themes till they look new again.