3.5
The Last Gentleman
By Walker PercyPublisher Description
National Book Award Finalist: A lonely Southerner forges a surprising bond with a New York family in this “brilliant” novel by the author of The Moviegoer (Time).
Will Barrett has never felt at peace. After moving from his native South to New York City, Will’s most meaningful human connections come through the lens of a telescope in Central Park, from which he views the comings and goings of the eccentric Vaught family.
But Will’s days as a spectator end when he meets the Vaught patriarch and accepts a job in the Mississippi Delta as caretaker for the family’s ailing son, Jamie. Once there, he is confronted not only by his personal demons, but also his growing love for Jamie’s sister, Kitty, and a deepening relationship with the Vaught family that will teach him the true meaning of home.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities12 Reviews
3.5
K_Sage
Created 5 months agoShare
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“I find Walker Percy to be a fascinating novelist, but I tend to feel like his work was so immediately relevant that I’m missing half of the point in everything I read from him. The Last Gentleman was published in 1966, after JFK was assassinated but before MLK, in the age of imminent moon landings and pop psychology, in the days of the Civil Rights Movement and Woodstock. Percy attends to many of the philosophical issues surrounding these types of events with comic, post-modern disillusionment, but it loses its flavor with a couple of generations of acclamation to these cultural upheavals.
Bill Barrett is born of true southern gentleman stock. His grandfather ran the KKK out of town and his father fought a fight that Atticus Finch would have been proud of, right up until the day that he ended his life in a way that any Faulkner character would have been proud of. As an adult, Barrett has wandered the country, quickly acclimating to whatever culture he comes across. He is in search of transcendence, but all he has found is a painful habit of blanking out and waking up months later, working in a menial position in a city he doesn’t remember ever seeing before.
When the amnesiac spends his life savings on a cutting edge telescope, he accidentally spies on two women exchanging notes in a secret notch in a park bench and becomes obsessed with discovering the meaning of these exchanges. Thus he tumbles headlong into a complicated drama with a road-trip oriented nouveau riche family who have a slight knowledge of all of his extended family. There is the father obsessed with money, the mother obsessed with hereditary honor, the philosophical black-sheep brother, the sister in the convent, the delightful coed, and the ailing teen genius, among others. As Bill is dragged back and forth in a many-directional tug of war, he is eager to help everyone in whatever ways he can, listless and aimless and forgetful on his own, desperate to find some sort of lodestar upon which to fix meaning in an age when everyone is selling something different.
This comic adventure in the South of the 60’s is full of questions of racial integration, psychology, philosophy, religion, and science. It feels a little disjointed to me at this point, but the comedy and the sense of aimlessness that might have been somewhat new then are similar to the ideas explored by Wes Anderson in his films today.”
Karla
Created about 1 year agoShare
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Andrew Voss
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Chloe B
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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Emily Marshall
Created over 5 years agoShare
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About Walker Percy
Walker Percy (1916–1990) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he was the oldest of three brothers in an established Southern family that contained both a Civil War hero and a U.S. senator. Acclaimed for his poetic style and moving depictions of the alienation of modern American culture, Percy was the bestselling author of six fiction titles—including the classic novel The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the National Book Award—and fifteen works of nonfiction. In 2005, Time magazinenamed The Moviegoer one of the best English-language books published since 1923.
Other books by Walker Percy
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