Customer Reviews

Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer

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William Rodney Allen's Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer is one of the finest studies of novelist Walker Percy. While most Percy criticism emphasizes Percy's theological interests--sometimes to the detriment of the works--Allen offers a complex reading that blends biographical research, psychoanalysis, and intertextuality. His readings are mostly unassailable, and he makes a fine case for Percy as not just an important Southern or Catholic author, but an important American author as well, working with and subverting some of the ideas of Twain and Hemingway. Highly recommended.

Wow, I am so glad to see that this powerful, sensitive study of Walker Percy through his work is now in print and available again in paperback.

Too often, valuable works like this are lost to successive generations, or left langueuring untouched on dusty library shelves. But what a second reading of Rodney Allen's careful Percy reveals is so much depth of reading, so much subtle understanding that was embodied in a man who carried his pen around in his shirt pocket (as we can see from the cover portrait), and now mostly lost as this great breed of southern artists has thinned and nearly died off in the age of iPhones and iPads, etc.

But Allen's work, in print again after twenty five years seems oddly fresh, his copious and uniformly salient quotations and personal anecdotes of Percy filling the pages, but managing to read like a life, and not a list. What is most relevant and at the heart of this work are Percy's personal, but universal struggles worked through over the course of his several novels, namely his struggle with the ghost of his father, and his final surrender to Catholic faith after an agnostic youth.

Rodney Allen's treatment of the life and writings of Walker Percy is a work of moving (but not too reverent), highly literate prose, placing them in context alongside Shakespeare and Conrad, Dylan Thomas and Hemingway, Faulkner and Shelby Foote, each of whom dealt in turn with the same existential issues.

This is criticism, not an appreciation, and Allen asks tough questions of Percy's work and philosophy, but the high caliber of this critique is in itself a defense of the worth of Percy's still-vital corpus, a body of work worthy of a "Second Coming," and which deals deeply with issues still (and perpetually) unresolved.