Welcome to Pass Christian Books -
Your Bookstore at the Harbor in Pass Christian!

Pass Christian, MS 39571
Telephone: (228) 452-7399
E-Mail: info@passchristianbooks.com

It is difficult to say if Walker Percy could exist today, or more accurately, the idea of a Walker Percy. Physician, Southerner, writer, semiotician, philosopher, tubercular patient, gentleman thinker - Percy assimilated his unique background and training into a search for congruity and order in a world of chaos and randomness.

Percy was born in 1916 and spent much of his adolescence in Birmingham. Tragically, affected by a family strain of depression, Walker's father Leroy Percy committed suicide.
Financially secure, Walker Percy's mother Mattie Sue moved with her two sons into the Greenville, Mississippi home of Will Percy. Soon after, Mattie Sue Percy drowned in an automobile accident.

The boys were now in the care of their learned "bachelor-poet-lawyer-planter" Uncle Will, future author of "Lanterns on the Levee." Walker Percy later commented, "If it hadn't been for Uncle Will, [I] probably would have ended up a car dealer in Athens, Georgia."

After years of wanderlust, both physical and intellectual, Percy married and settled in Covington, Louisiana. Though a physician, he never practiced. At thirty-one, Percy converted from an agnostic stance to Catholicism. The days in Covington were passed in philosophical study and reflection.

In his early forties, Percy published his first novel, "The Moviegoer" to critical acclaim and a National Book Award. The lead character, Binx Bolling, sets the tone for other central characters in future novels - the outsider searching for logic and relevance in a world of pliable standards, empty gestures, and transparent values.

The ideas of Walker Percy propel his fiction. In "The Last Gentleman," Percy's second novel, the first sentence is a clue to the story to follow: "One fine day in early summer a young man lay thinking in Central Park." Part of Percy's talent was in his ability to convey ideas, and often several opposing ideas, in an interesting narrative.

Will Barrett is "The Last Gentleman", a Mississippian temporarily dislocated physically in New York City and also dislocated in spirit, subject to "spells" and "deja vus." Barrett sometimes removes himself from life and just observes, "I'm not well, and therefore it is fitting that I should sit still, like an Englishman in his burrow, and see what can be seen."

Barrett has finely tuned radar into the motives and psyches of others, almost telepathy, but frequently becomes overwhelmed in sensations, and cannot resist, "As a consequence this young man, dislocated to begin with, hardly knew who he was from one day to the next. There were times he took roles so successfully that he left off being who he was and became someone else."

In broad symbolism, Percy is also writing about the South's loss of traditional identity. As Barrett tries to find a comfortable persona, so struggles the New South. Upon Barrett's return to the South, "The earth itself was transformed overnight, gouged and filled, flattened and hilled, like a big sandpile. The whole South throbbed like a diesel."

Percy struggled all of his life to assimilate his progressively conservative upbringing by Uncle Will, and generations of eroding traditions, with the reforms and advances that he knew were just and overdue. Barrett's identity was in flux; so was that of Percy's beloved South. Geography and sense of place are central to Percy's fiction.

Percy's sense of humor is as dry as vermouth. Whether in description ("Dead trees shrouded in kudzu vines reared up like old women"), or in moving the plot forward, one always has the sense that Percy wore a wry half-smile loosely on his countenance as he wrote characters into and out of situations we all face. A crackly dry irony is the ink that illuminates Percy's words on the page.

Ideas in the hands of Walker Percy entertain, perplex, fascinate, amuse, and ultimately congeal to create a voice and fiction that remain unique and relevant.