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Signposts in a Strange Land

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Though better known as a novelist, Walker Percy began his writing career with non-fiction pieces of a philosophical bent. He remains one of the most philosophical novelists of the late 20th century, and his first novel, The Moviegoer, is widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature. This collection covers Percy's major interests over the span of his career: the literally miraculous ability of humans to communicate with language, the unique qualities of Southern writing (and why, for instance, there are no great Los Angeles novelists or Zen Buddhist novelists), and the curious fact that late-twentieth century western man is bored, weary, and sad, despite living in the most affluent period in human history.

Like C. S. Lewis, Percy became a Christian after spending his young adult years as a confirmed atheist. For this reason, he is particularly adept at addressing the intellectual impediments to belief. His work is the perfect antidote to those who think that smart people don't believe in God. He was also a scientist, having been trained as a medical doctor. Science, he believed, has discovered how the universe works but has been unable to address the most important fact of our existence: that each of us is a self-aware human being who will one day die. Percy was profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard and thus has been called a Christian existentialist, though he finds the term has become meaningless through overuse.

This is a fascinating overview of Percy's ideas. As a bonus, the book concludes with a whimsical self-interview that lets us see what a delightful man he would have been to know. Highly recommended, along with his Lost in the Cosmos, which further develops many of the ideas here in the mock format of a self-help book.

This book is perfect as either an introduction to Walker Percy's thought or as a final collection of essays for the longtime fan. "Signposts" is the only book available that provides Percy's writing from virtually every stage of his life, including the period when he was completely unknown. That fact alone makes it worth the purchase.

Though better known as a novelist, Walker Percy began his writing career with non-fiction pieces of a philosophical bent. He remains one of the most philosophical novelists of the late 20th century, and his first novel, The Moviegoer, is widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature. This collection covers Percy's major interests over the span of his career: the literally miraculous ability of humans to communicate with language, the unique qualities of Southern writing (and why, for instance, there are no great Los Angeles novelists or Zen Buddhist novelists), and the curious fact that late-twentieth century western man is bored, weary, and sad, despite living in the most affluent period in human history.

Like C. S. Lewis, Percy became a Christian after spending his young adult years as a confirmed atheist. For this reason, he is particularly adept at addressing the intellectual impediments to belief. His work is the perfect antidote to those who think that smart people don't believe in God. He was also a scientist, having been trained as a medical doctor. Science, he believed, has discovered how the universe works but has been unable to address the most important fact of our existence: that each of us is a self-aware human being who will one day die. Percy was profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard and thus has been called a Christian existentialist, though he finds the term has become meaningless through overuse.

This is a fascinating overview of Percy's ideas. As a bonus, the book concludes with a whimsical self-interview that lets us see what a delightful man he would have been to know. Highly recommended, along with his Lost in the Cosmos, which further develops many of the ideas here in the mock format of a self-help book.

This is not the place to start, if you haven't read Percy before. When read fresh, much of this collection of essays comes across as rambling, with the themes of "Southerner," "Catholic," "Author," "Southern Catholic Author," and "Fan o' Kierkegaard & Dostoevsky" running incessantly throughout the volume.

However, Percy's engaging wit keeps the essays entertaining, and it is interesting to watch his fixations and how they change (or don't change) over time.

Of particular value is the discourse on semiotics, which is a nice primer to the uninitiated, but doesn't help one make heads or tails of Umberto Eco.

Still, I would recommend reading Percy's fiction before tackling this collection.

This book was issued in 1991, to collect under one cover some of the more important essays or pieces of non-fiction by Walker Percy, who had died in 1990. I happen to think that Percy is one of this country's more underappreciated novelists and men of letters. "The Moviegoer", in particular, is a classic of American literature from the second half of the 20th Century. But, as these essays demonstrate, Percy was not only a novelist, he was a relatively deep thinker, concerned with science versus art, religion and morality, language and semiotics, psychiatry, the South and "the New South", as well as literature.

The earliest essay in the book is from 1935, the latest from 1990. Most of the essays, and the best of the essays, are from 1968 through 1986. Not surprisingly, some of the essays are, in whole or in part, now rather dated. Percy's "essay voice" is relatively informal and easy to read, but he does not modulate it very much from piece to piece so that, when three or more pieces are read in succession, a measure of monotony creeps in.

Most of us, I suspect, believe we live in unusually unsettled and unsettling times. So it was with Percy too. He believed that "the modern world had ended" and that "society has been overtaken by a sense of malaise rather than exuberance, by fragmentation rather than wholeness." He further believed that the function of art was cognitive, and that the novelist's duty in these troubled times was to engage in a sort of diagnostic enterprise. That perspective informs the title of this collection of essays, which is further explicated in the following quote from Percy: "Instead of constructing a plot and creating a cast of characters from a world familiar to everybody, [the novelist] is more apt to set forth with a stranger in a strange land where the signposts are enigmatic but which he sets out to explore nevertheless."

Actually, from the retrospective vantage point of 2011, the terrain and many of the signposts encountered in this book are not so very strange. Still, it is a book worth reading, or at least dipping in and sampling. I was not converted by any of Percy's larger philosophical constructs, but many of his "smaller" and less abstract comments I found worth noting and marking in pencil (I always use pencil), including things he had to say about Charles Sanders Peirce, Soren Kierkegaard, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and his own novels (especially "The Moviegoer"). I also enjoyed a piece he wrote for "Esquire" on bourbon whiskey, which included the following paragraph:

"The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one's value system--that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean values of cultivating one's sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one's health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship * * * is the aesthetic of damnation."

If that appeals to you, you are a potential reader of SIGNPOSTS IN A STRANGE LAND. If it doesn't, maybe you should steer clear. But I can vouch for Percy's recipe for mint juleps, which I tried out four days ago at a mini-family gathering after burying my aunt after her 96 years in this strange land.

Though better known as a novelist, Walker Percy began his writing career with non-fiction pieces of a philosophical bent. He remains one of the most philosophical novelists of the late 20th century, and his first novel, The Moviegoer, is widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature. This collection covers Percy's major interests over the span of his career: the literally miraculous ability of humans to communicate with language, the unique qualities of Southern writing (and why, for instance, there are no great Los Angeles novelists or Zen Buddhist novelists), and the curious fact that late-twentieth century western man is bored, weary, and sad, despite living in the most affluent period in human history.

Like C. S. Lewis, Percy became a Christian after spending his young adult years as a confirmed atheist. For this reason, he is particularly adept at addressing the intellectual impediments to belief. His work is the perfect antidote to those who think that smart people don't believe in God. He was also a scientist, having been trained as a medical doctor. Science, he believed, has discovered how the universe works but has been unable to address the most important fact of our existence: that each of us is a self-aware human being who will one day die. Percy was profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard and thus has been called a Christian existentialist, though he finds the term has become meaningless through overuse.

This is a fascinating overview of Percy's ideas. As a bonus, the book concludes with a whimsical self-interview that lets us see what a delightful man he would have been to know. Highly recommended, along with his Lost in the Cosmos, which further develops many of the ideas here in the mock format of a self-help book.

a better title for this book might be, strange signposts in an otherwise interesting world. He became a devout Catholic while the rest of us were questioning its relevance. C. Pierce's psychologic discovery or insight does not seem especially significant. This MD does not provide the right presciption for our times.