THE THANATOS SYNDROME
Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987
372 pp., $17.95
Walker Percy reminds one of a cagey old fox that covers his tracks, conceals his scent, dives into a hollowed-out log, and calmly preens himself as the hounds whine, snuffle, and thrash around in the bushes. Percy eludes the categorizing hounds that seek to bring him to bay; he refuses to allow his pelt to be nailed to anyone's barn door. Whose side is he on? Is he a conservative or a liberal or neither? Is he a Southern writer or not? Is he an existentialist, a Catholic, both, or neither? One has to sneak up on Percy to catch him. His pursuer must discard the cumbersome labels so beloved of critics, scholars, and ideologues; creep stealthily through the underbrush and sidle around the trees; and surprise Percy in his lair before he can light out again.
Percy's most perceptive readers have not come mainly from the ranks of litterateurs equipped with critical theories, literary arcane, and enough cockeyed ideological baggage to fill a lecture hall to the ceiling, but from amateurs who know that Percy is, as one of his protagonists would say, "on to something." This is an odd and disparate bunch: drunken Southerners, defrocked Catholic priests, pixilated maiden aunts, distrait existentialists, down-at-the-heels writers, believing unbelievers, unbelieving believers. They agree on one thing: Walker Percy understands. What? Everything: the nuttiness of existence, the simultaneously hilarious and lamentable loopiness of homo sapiens, the wackiness that permeates "normal" life.
Percy Relents: Another Novel
Imagine the perturbation that seized these forlorn souls when Percy, after the publication of The Second Coming in 1981, intimated that this was it: no more novels. Sure enough, in his next book, Lost in the Cosmos (1983), he crafted a droll analysis - winsomely labeled a self-help book - of the zoo known as America. Although it bore the familiar Percy touch, it was not quite the same as having another of his novels. Perhaps to save his readers from total despair, Percy has published another novel (his sixth), The Thanatos Syndrome. Even better, he has revivified Dr. Tom More, the wry, slightly fey boozer, lapsed Catholic, and "old-fashioned physician of the soul," who made his first appearance in Love in the Ruins sixteen years ago.
This earlier work is a manic, apocalyptic novel set in the (then) future of 1983. Though the "good old USA" is on the skids, Dr. More, by novel's end, has settled down in the company of a "lusty Presbyterian wife" to cultivate his garden in Canadian fashion. All has not gone well for the doctor in the intervening years, for when The Thanatos Syndrome opens in the mid-1990s he has just returned to Feliciana Parish and the Baton Rouge area from a two-year stint in a minimum-security prison for peddling uppers and downers to truck drivers.
Heavy Sodium
More resumes his life of bemused liquoring and quizzical observation of his fellow creatures, only to discover that something is amiss. His former patients, once wracked with fears and anxieties, have changed. "In each there has
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