Volume 27, Number 13 · August 14, 1980
To the Greenhouse
By Robert Towers
The Second Coming
by Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 360 pp., $12.95
Like some cranky, humorously irritable, small-town autodidact, Dr. Walker Percy continues to rail against the insanity of modern American life as he encounters it. One imagines him shaking his fist at the cheery, complacent twiceborn as they stream out of the First Baptist Church on a Sunday morning; or growling imprecations at some jovial golfers on the fairway, telling them that knocking that silly little ball around is merely their futile way of denying the obvious: that they are all dead, whether they know it or not. More genially, one imagines him sipping bourbon, spouting Hamlet, quoting Kierkegaard, producing arcane bits of neurological or linguistic lore, attacking psychoanalysis and the Californian ethos, and speculating about the mysterious destiny of the Jews with some equally wry crony—perhaps a Roman Catholic priest.
Review, 3435 words
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