The auto age is defunct. Buicks, Chryslers, and Pontiacs disfigure the landscape. Vines sprout in Manhattan. Wolves are seen in downtown Cleveland. And psychiatrist, mental hospital outpatient, and inventor Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument: the ontological lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind’s spiritual flu. But first, he must survive Moira, Lola, and Ellen—and discover why so many living people are actually dead. Attempting to save the world from completely destroying itself, Tom ultimately begins to understand the quality and caprices of life and the uncontrollable vagaries of time and chance.
“Profoundly moving…One of the major novels of our time.”--Milwaukee Journal
Lancelot Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don’t seem worth remembering—until a visit from an old friend and classmate gives him the opportunity to recount his journey of dark violence.
It began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter. That discovery touched off his obsession to reverse the degeneration of modern America and begin a new age of chivalry and romance. With ever increasing fury, Lancelot would become a shining knight, not of romance—but of revenge.
“A modern knight-errant on a quest after evil…Convincing and chilling.”—New York Times Book Review
Williston Bibb Barrett is a rather unusual and inquisitive young Southerner with a special gift for cultivating the possibilities of life. He suffers from occasional bouts of amnesia and disconcerting attacks of déjà vu. He clings to certain old-fashioned notions of behavior, and yet he finds himself constantly impelled to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. And he lives with the secret suspicion that the great world catastrophe that everyone fears will happen has already happened.
The novel follows Will Barrett’s adventures as he becomes involved in the complex troubles, loves, and fortunes of a Southern family, the Vaughts, that is living in the shadow of their youngest son’s illness. With settings ranging from New York to Alabama, Louisiana to New Mexico, this is an ambitious, funny, compulsively readable novel about the dilemmas of modern man.
“Splendid…A beautifully textured novel…A distinguished work of art.”—New York Times Book Review
Will Barrett of Linwood, North Carolina, is a depressed widower with a peculiar tendency to fall down in strange places. Allison, the girl in the greenhouse, has just escaped from a mental institution and is working hard to make a new life for herself. When their paths cross in a most unusual manner, a relationship begins that will help restore two struggling outcasts to new life.
What follows is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will undertakes his own Pascalian wager in search of proof of the existence of God. Leaving his comfortable home atop a pleasant Carolina mountain and descending deep into the bowels of the long-unused Lost Cove cave, he is prepared to wait for a sign—which may, of course, be death. What he is not prepared for is what actually happens.
“Splendid…A beautifully textured novel…A distinguished work of art…Walker Percy’s perception luminously lights up obscure depths of experience without at the same time explaining that experience away.”—New York Times Book Review
When Dr. Tom More (of Love in the Ruins) is released on parole from state prison, he returns to Feliciana, Louisiana, the parish where he was born and bred, and where he practiced psychiatry before his arrest. Upon arriving, he notices something strange in almost everyone around him: unusual sexual behavior in women patients, a bizarre loss of inhibition, a lack of complexity in speech—even his own wife’s extraordinary success at bridge tournaments, during which her mind seems to function like a computer.
With the ingenious help of his attractive cousin, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, More begins to uncover a criminal experiment to “improve” people’s behavior by drugging the local water supply. But beyond this scheme are activities so sinister that even Tom More wouldn’t believe them if he hadn’t witnessed them with his own eyes.
“Spins along at a brisk thriller pace, laced with escapes and chase scenes and risky, ingenious detective work.”—Gail Godwin, New York Times Book Review
A winner of the National Book Award, The Moviegoer established Walker Percy as an insightful and grimly humorous storyteller. It is the tale of Binx Bolling, a small-time stockbroker who lives quietly in suburban New Orleans, pursuing an interest in the movies, affairs with his secretaries, and living out his days. But soon he finds himself on a "search" for something more important, some spiritual truth to anchor him.
Binx's life floats casually along until one fateful Mardi Gras week, when a bizarre series of events leads him to his unlikely salvation. In his half-brother Lonnie, who is confined to a wheelchair and soon to die, and his stepcousin Kate, whose predicament is even more ominous, Binx begins to find the sort of "certified reality" that had eluded him everywhere but at the movies.
"A brilliant novel....Percy touches the rim of so many human mysteries."-Harper's
