Volume 24, Number 5 · March 31, 1977
Southern Discomfort
By Robert Towers
Lancelot
by Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 257 pp., $8.95
Not very long ago a New York critic, who sometimes seems too acutely attuned to the fluctuations of literary fashion, proclaimed the extinction of the Southern novel as a vital force in American literature. He was indignantly scolded for his presumption by a far-from-extinct Southern writer who may any day surprise us with another masterpiece. Both the presumption and the indignation could have been averted by a more accurate phrasing of the issue. To the degree that the designation 'Southern' suggests a backward region of eroded fields and fly-specked towns, obsessed by past glory and defeat, encumbered by an archaically complex system of class and race relationships, torn by conflicting tendencies toward humor, kindliness, xenophobia, and violence—to this degree the critic was probably right. The old subject matter has been pretty well exhausted, though green shoots will occasionally sprout from the hard-packed clay.
Review, 3765 words
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