Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World [Hardcover]

Walker Percy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1971

Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A great adventure...So outrageous and so real, one is left speechless."--Chicago Sun Times

"Immensely readable, vividly entertaining."--Los Angeles Times

"Brilliant and hilarious . . . some of the most fascinating characters you'll ever encounter."--Dallas Morning News

"One of the major novels of our time."--Milwaukee Journal

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From the Publisher

"A great adventure...So outrageous and so real, one is left speechless." --Chicago Sun-Times

"A comedy of love against a field of anarchy...Percy is easily one of the finest writers we have." --New York Times Book Review

"Immensely readable, vividly entertaining." --Los Angeles Times

"Brilliant and hilarious...some of the most fascinating characters you'll ever encounter." --Dallas Morning News

"One of the major novels of our time." --Milwaukee Journal --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 403 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (May 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374193029
• ISBN-13: 978-0374193027
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #932,134 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

71 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Apocalypse - A Black Comedy Of The Spirit, May 25, 2005

By 

Stephen Triesch (Shoreline/Seattle USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love in the Ruins (Paperback)

Originally written in the aftermath of the social upheavals of the 1960s, this book may seem dated to some. But if the specific social context has changed, the fragmentation of American society continues unabated, as does the crisis of the human spirit that this book describes and addresses. So, for me, the book remains supremely relevant, supremely perceptive, brilliantly written, and hilariously funny.

Set in the Deep South of an America in a virtual state of civil war and anarchy, "Love In The Ruins" follows the exploits of its flawed hero, Dr. Tom More, a boozing psychiatrist and lapsed Catholic. More has invented the lapsometer - a "stethoscope of the soul" - that enables people to both diagnose and treat their inner demons. But in the wrong hands, the lapsometer can wreak havoc, and much of the book traces More's efforts to keep the lapsomoter out of the hands of a government determined to use the lapsometer for its own nefarious purposes.

Percy brilliantly describes and satirizes the competing elements in this American Apocalypse - the country club conservatives, the "groovy" priests, the religious Right and Left, the technocrats, the sexologists, the racists, the Black revolutionaries, the drop-outs, and the sinister but bungling government bureaucrats who have their own vision of a "Brave New World."

From its masterful opening pages (which, contrary to another reviewer, I think are just about the best writing I've seen in modern American literature) this book will outrage partisans of the Left and Right while giving hope to those who try to occupy the "radical center" where the human spirit is defended against the predations of all the "isms" of the modern world.

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars societal fragmentation, angelism/bestialism, psychotherapy, October 5, 2002

By 

Penn Jacobs (Rutherford, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Love in the Ruins (Paperback)

Walker Percy died over a decade ago, leaving a small but dedicated readership. A dilettante whose interests ran from medicine and psychiatry (Percy was an M. D.) to semiotics, philosophy, and religion, we remember Percy for his slightly cantankerous (but never malicious) outlook on modernity and the human condition.

"Love in the Ruins," written in '71, imagines a U.S.A. in which prevalent (and sometimes contradictory) trends run to their illogical extremes -- political association becomes fragmented to the point of neo-tribalism, mainline churches become secularized to the point of banality or fixated to the point of intolerance, and psychological treatment grows increasing manipulative. Into this world he drops Dr. Tom More, "bad Catholic" and the inventor of the Ontological Lapsometer. The Lapsometer measures the degree to which a soul has fallen, the degree of estrangement and alienation it has attained. One particular sickness it detects is angelism/bestialism -- the tendency to go from spirit-like abstraction to animal appetite with little moderation. Like all technologies, the Lapsometer becomes a means of social and spiritual manipulation, and Dr. More and his device set in play a story that leads the world to the brink of apocalypse.

By turns desperate and hilarious, this readable novel holds up well today. I also recommend "Lost in the Cosmos," which contains many of the same ideas, but in more of a tragi-comic essay form.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evelyn Waugh on crack, July 13, 2006

By 

Philip Blosser (Detroit, Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love in the Ruins (Paperback)

If you like the Catholic Flannery O'Connor's depth analysis of human nature, and can endure its frequent morbidity; if you like Evelyn Waugh's sense of humor and thought The Loved One was amusing; try Walker Percy. Walker Percy is Evelyn Waugh on crack. And the place to start is with Percy's Love in the Ruins. It's not his first novel, or even the first to win him recognition (that would be his Moviegoer). But it's a tour-de-force analysis of the human condition in a Louisiana setting by a womanizing, semi-alcoholic, lapsed Catholic protagonist who, despite (or by means of?) the hyterical laughter of the reader, sheds new light at every turn on the human condition. One imagines the brilliant Percy, with twinkling eye, smiling down upon the event. (The next book to read must be Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, a book unlike any other in the cosmos -- not a novel, but another absolute must-read!