The Second Coming

Yesterday, I finished The Second coming by Mr. Walker Percy, first published in 1980.
Before I launch into my critique, I have to admit that I didn’t read the book right.
By that I mean that I took far too long to read it, almost three weeks.
Being a very slow reader, I found that novels are much better when you finish them within a week.
I tend to accuse authors of being too wordy and making their stories unnecessarily long, when it is partly my own fault, because leaving a story unread for a few days creates the illusion of a slowed-down pace of plot development.
So, at the risk of not being entirely fair to Mr. Percy, I will proceed. Besides, I don’t think he’d care very much one way or the other on account of him being quite dead.
The Second coming follows two characters: Allison and Will. Allie is a girl who has escaped from a mental institution and Will is a middle-aged, retired millionaire who spends his days golfing and thinking about the suicide of his father. Will suffers from mysterious spells which cause him to fall down and black out.
The narrative alternates between the two characters until they meet somewhere in the second half of the story.
I found Allie’s character by far the more interesting, as we first meet her sitting on a bench in a South Carolina town ( the whole story unfolds there, not counting a few flashbacks that take place elsewhere) without any memory of herself or anything else. As it turns out, Allie has received electroshock treatments which cause temporary amnesia. Allie is like the first person on earth and she needs to learn pretty much everything anew, including the difference between denotation and the sometimes contradictory connotations in human communication. Her own cryptic, alliterative speech pattern is the only bit of humor that I could discern in this story.
I got to like Allie and was rooting for her to succeed in her attempts to function in the world.
Will is Walker Percy. This becomes very clear when I saw the picture of the author on the back of the dust jacket and when I read his bio on Wiki. Percy’s father committed suicide by shotgun blast to the head, as did his grandfather. Having also lost his mother at a young age, it isn’t surprising that death and suicide become a major theme in his work, but I found the many instances where Will wonders about his father’s suicide and (SPOILER ALERT: the discovery that during a hunting incident in his youth, his father had tried to kill Will) too repetitive. Although the end of the story is satisfactory, there isn’t enough plot development to keep one interested in Will’s plight.
I am starting to notice that some writers are too interested in their own persona which they inject in a story.
There is no doubt, though, that Percy is a good writer, with a good eye for the Carolina landscape, true-to-life dialogue and more than a little insight in the world and people surrounding his characters.
The religious theme in the story didn’t work that well and the characters beside the two protagonists are sketched quickly and never really come to life. For example, we never get to learn much about his wife and daughter, other than that the former was fat and is now dead and the latter is a sour-faced, discontented Jesus Freak.
The title may hint at Will’s existential angst and fascination with Christianity, but the real meaning of it is revealed at the end of the book when (SPOILER ALERT) we learn that sexual ecstasy is seen as the first coming (yes, literally) and that the longing for death is seen as the second.
Overall I enjoyed The Second Coming. I liked it much better than the previous two books I read (All the King’s men, by Pen Warren and The human Stain by Philip Roth [boy, that one was disappointing]) but I thought the book I read prior to these two, The good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck was much better.
On the Literati Frittati scale, Mr. Percy receives 6.5 out of a possible 10 Winonas.
PS. I have been told that his novel The Moviegoer is quite good, so I will read that one later this year.