review of The Thanatos Syndrome, by Walker Percy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987.

In spite of his six widely read novels, his two works of nonfiction (with their original contributions to the study of language and the human psyche), and his two national literary awards, Walker Percy remains a figure on the fringes of the American literary establishment. When he wrote a letter on the subject of abortion to the New York Times recently, it never saw newsprint—spiked on the editor’s desk. (Imagine this happening to a letter on Reaganomics from Gore Vidal, or on racial discrimination from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.) This same newspaper, on the occasion of the publication of Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, wheeled out a big gun, novelist Francine du Plessix Gray, to fire a vitriolic review at the book. Nevertheless, a few weeks later, Lost in the Cosmos won the National Book Award—a rare, but well-deserved tribute to a compelling writer.

Walker Percy, who has many admirers among scholars and the average, “educated” reader, has encountered so much hostility precisely because his vision is resolutely at odds with the prevailing secular liberalism of the “New Class” intellectuals who dominate our cultural citadels. Indeed, I would venture to say that with the sole exception of Flannery O’Connor, whom Percy has repeatedly cited as a kindred spirit, no other American novelist in this century has more accurately diagnosed the spiritual crisis of modernity.

A Southerner and a Catholic, Percy has a profound knowledge of modern philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Influenced as a young man by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, he has developed a form of Christian existentialism that is at once sympathetic to, and critical of, the modern temper. Percy, like another of his mentors, the Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel, believes in the concept of homo viator, the notion that man is a wayfarer in the world, a pilgrim in need of a destination. But Percy does not engage in the cosmic melodrama that often seems to afflict French existentialists: both in his novels and satiric sketches, he catches perfectly the domesticated forms of despair that permeate the daily experience of suburbanites.

If Percy can be seen as an antagonist of liberals, he is equally tough on what often passes for conservatism today. Those who pretend that the West’s ills can be cured through the purely political means of anti-Communist foreign policy and the unfettering of the free market are in fact participating in the modern malaise, according to Percy. Activists on Left and Right are caught up in abstractions; they avoid the fundamental questions about human nature: What is man? What is he made for? Where is he going? Thus the majority of politicians and intellectuals on both sides would rather avoid the “social issues”—abortion, euthanasia, the condition of the family—and get on with their managerial plans for the economy and international relations.

Percy’s vision goes deeper; he writes novels which dramatize the dictum that ideas have consequences (“Books matter,” one of his protagonists says). His fiction hovers between the more intellectual content of satire and the more dramatic density of the traditional novel. Conservatives of a more philosophical bent, whose understanding of modernity has been shaped by such thinkers as Eric Voegelin, Richard Weaver, and Jacques Maritain, ought to read Percy’s fiction. Given the recent popularity of his latest novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, it may be a good place to enter Percy’s imaginative world.