Customer Reviews

The Last Gentleman

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Marooned in New York City, displaced Southerner Will Barrett finds himself utterly abstracted from his world and himself. When a chance encounter in Central Park leads him to make the acquaintance of the Vaughts, fellow Southerners who knew his father, Will embarks on a journey that he hopes will tell him what he desperately needs to know. What does he need to know? If Will knew the answer to that, he wouldn't need the Vaughts, or the South, or the haunted memory of his father. Traversing the country, Will seeks the one man he believes will tell him what to do. Percy not only weaves a lush character study of lost Will, but realizes a profound meditation on the nature of identity, place, and home. Above all, like any good picaresque novel, Will's journey is not so much about the end, but about what he discovers along the way. However, as a testament to Percy's imagination and probity, Will's final destination provides nothing less than utter revelation. I closed this book and jumped out of bed immediately, my breath coming in gulps as I absorbed and processed what Walker Percy had taught me with such love, patience, beauty and truth.

Will Barrett, often bemused, confused, and having the uncanny ability to take on the characteristics of others to fit in as needed, seeks the meaning of life through his telescope (his powers of observation as well as a literal telescope), and a journey prompted by a girl he spys on in Central Park. While Will feels lost to himself, struggling with modern morality, the "new" South, and his family history, those he meets on his often humorous journey from New York back to the South, and finally, the new frontier of the West, often mistake him as the salvation to ease their own paths. Walker Percy is the master of fusing philosopy, religion, and an examination of the pitfalls in modern life with humor and storytelling.

Deceptively meandering at first, slow to take root in the mind, Percy's 'The Last Gentleman' will reward persistent readers with an egrossing and entertaining characterization of the human condition. Will Barrett is the literary everyman who is never happy when things are pleasant, never satisfied at the feast, never more invigorated than when his contemporaries feel hopeless. And he doesn't have any idea why. A richly sympbolic telescope brings him into an encounter with a lovely young woman, a dying youth, a pornographic and incompetent doctor and a 'mean as hell' nun - all in the same family. While Barrett travels with this crew and ponders the unanswerable questions that continue to plague him, he becomes aware that the sick youth's 'salvation' may be 'up to' him. This is a skillful novel with elusive, eclectic characters surrounding a young protagonist whose only crime is an honest search for the truth, so that his life will take on some real meaning. The scene where Barrett converses with the nun while she feeds viscera to a bird of prey is particularly insightful and stimulating. A meaty, complex, thinking-person's novel.

This is actually my favorite Percy novel. While I believe the Moviegoer uses an excellent device, watching movies, to depict the alienation of the moder/post-modern man I identified much more closely with the engineer in this novel. Percy believed that boredom and a sense of disconnection were the ultimate products of the modernist agenda. I believe Barret perfectly describes the average denizen of modernity who doesn't know who he is, where he is going, or what he is for.
Autobiographically, I grew up as a transplanted midwesterner in the deep south. What I loved so much about this novel is how much I could identify with the main character's sense of rootlessness.

I recently read The Moviegoer by Percy, and I would definately rate it as my favorite novel. I was really excited to pick of The Last Gentleman as my second Percy novel, and though I would not rate it as highly as The Moviegoer, it was far from a disappointment. It is certainly a book that I will cherish among my very favorites.

The primary character of the novel is Bill Barrett (who is more often called the engineer). The engineer suffers from amnesia and periods of deja vu, and he reads about a near-apocolyptic catostrophe and wonders if it has already happened. He is the lost (dead) American. One day, looking through his telescope, he sees a girl, and the result is that he becomes involved with her family the Vaughts. The relationship with them ends up sending him on a journey through the South and on to New Mexico, a journey in which he gains a type of salvation.

One of Percy's primary beliefs about novel writing was that it should be entertaining, and The Last Gentleman succeeds. It is at times hilarious and is often moving. It is true that there are periods where it drags a little, but the truths Percy presents more than make up for those sections. The Last Gentleman is a supremely beautiful, entertaining, and thoughtful novel.

None of us, I think would bother to read a philosophical novel where the characters merely spend all their time involved in philosophical dialogue. It would be better just to read straight philosophy and get the concentrated dosage. So the trick is to write a novel in which the characters and happenings are engaging enough in their own right to hold our interest, all the while being vehicles for the ideas the author wants to explore.

This is the kind of book we encounter in 'The Last Gentleman'. It can be difficult for such a novel to reach it's proper audience. Because the book does adhere to the form of a conventional novel, many readers will be expecting more color and action to entertain them. For just such potential readers, the marketing promoters for the 1968 paperback version had concocted this blurb: "A wild safari from Central Park to New Mexico with a Princeton dropout who spies on strangers... and a dying young genius and his lively, luscious sister." While containing grains of truth, this description is entirely skewed and misleading. Nothing new about misleading blurbs, you are probably saying, but I only mention this as an example of what not to expect from the book.

We might get a more accurate indication of the author's intentions by noting the prefatory quotations from Kierkegaard and Romano Guardini, both of whom were philosophers who wrote about the problems of the individual, with an emphasis on Christian ethics. Kierkegaard was absorbed with the intelligent quest for self-identity based on investigation of the individual's relation to the circumstances of the real world, not the pious platitudes of organized Danish religion of the time, which he considered drivel. Guardini was a Catholic priest and intellectual who wrote about the problems of the modern world in light of the Catholic faith, seeing the secular nature of the modern world leading to a will to power giving birth to totalitarianism and other dangers, and stressing the role of the individual as a free moral agent answerable to God.

These philosophical underpinnings lie embedded in the story of this displaced and drifting young Southerner, Will Barrett, and his involvement with an old, upper-crust, wealthy and eccentric Southern family. His adventures, while entertaining, have the primary purpose of furthering the protagonist's odyssey toward self-knowledge. True to the spirit of Kierkegaard, this quest takes place not in the abstract realm of the intellect only, but it's itinerary is composed of very specific real-world localities with the corresponding attributes of each impacting the hero's sensibilities and challenging his incipient self-hood. He meets figures who epitomize secular, religious, worldly, naive, etc. aspects of humanity. There are no paragons; all are shown as individuals with human failings and strengths.

How well does all this succeed as literature? My answer is 4 out of 5 stars. It gave me some interesting food for thought, while providing some mildly entertaining glimpses of a certain stratum of life in the Deep South of the 1960's, as well as drama involving bigotry and other ethical considerations set in various locales, with enough irony and humor to keep things well-rounded. It is a novel of becoming rather than attaining, so don't look for any startling epiphanies in it's conclusion.

Percy explores the need in each of us for authenticity- that highly allusive quality in a fragmented, uprooted time. He gives us Will Barrett- a modern day Prince Myshkin- who reveals the difficulty for anyone seeking a truly meaningful existence, made even more onerous by the times in which we live.

Percy, however, was no tragedian. The novelist points the way toward hope; in fact, Will's rambling thoughts- by the sheer nature of his grappling- provide a key he will escape, or perhaps even better, transcend inauthenticity. Barret cannot verbalize this, but the novel's end makes you feel that Will is on his way.

A tidier novel, one longed for by the Cambridge reader, demands less of Will than can be expected for him- or us, Percy is saying- to reach this plateau.

This explains why in his critical essays Percy bemoaned the effect t.v. sitcoms and soap operas had in trivializing the essential strugggle that makes life real.

Will Barrett is a confused young man. A drop-out, not only of Princeton, but basically of life in general, in this picaresque novel Barrett goes on a "spiritual quest" that takes him from NYC to his ancestral home in the Mississippi Delta to the desert around Santa Fe in search of answers on how to live. He falls in love with Kitty, encounters her family, faces ghosts from his own past, and breaks from his self-imposed stupor and acts. Will spends much of the novel observing: he views life through a telescope and spends a lot of time in front of a TV set. Gradually he learns to free himself from this bondage (he says he wanted to view life as a scientist might) and begins living life as a participant and not just as an observer. Will doesn't forget the value of contemplation and at the end of the novel is still a "watcher and listener," but by this stage has a better idea of who he is. Percy is a comic writer and many of the scenes are funny (and symbolic): the ending with Sutter Vaught and his Edsel is hilarious. Well written and searching, Percy's novel insists that people must reach out beyond themselves to find happiness and sanity.

But you are not supposed to. If you are looking for Percy the catholic here you will be let down. If you are looking for Percy the southernman you will be let down. If you are looking for Percy the novelist you will love this book. The story is long and the observations about human behavior are incredible. A eye for people is on display and if you are wait threw the slow start you will see some truly great writing. Never have I read a book and wish I could talk to the author somuch..Truly great stuff..You might even find you know Will or the Vaught's..enjoy and read with wine.

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 picaresque experience of driving from New York City into the Deep 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 intellectual 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 debilitating sensitivity and episodic 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 the novel 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.