Amy read and liked Charlotte's review of The Second Coming: A Novel:

" Walker Percy is not for everyone but go look up some reviews and see if he is a fit. For me, he is. "

Amy read and liked Alan's review of The Second Coming:

"A morose, cynical, brilliantly-written work of extreme introspection.

From the moment Will Barrett collapses on a Linwood, North Carolina golf course in the first chapter, it's apparent that he is a man in dire need of something that he's ...more A morose, cynical, brilliantly-written work of extreme introspection.

From the moment Will Barrett collapses on a Linwood, North Carolina golf course in the first chapter, it's apparent that he is a man in dire need of something that he's not getting, despite the fact that he is an athletic and wealthy widower who moves gracefully through society's higher levels. From the moment we meet Allie Vaught, who has checked herself out of (not to put too fine a point upon it: escaped) a nearby sanitarium, it's apparent that she too needs more help than she's likely to get while living on her own. It's inevitable and hence no spoiler to the story to reveal that they eventually meet. The pleasures of this book are not so much in the bare bones of its plot as they are in the characters, their inner lives, their conversations and their interactions.

When I began reading this I had to check the publication date, and I was still suspicious... this book has a very 1960s feel to it, although it was not published until 1980. Both the attitudes of the characters and the milieu in which they moved seemed more like a reconstruction of an age which was bygone even then. The language used by these southern WASPs is sometimes very raw and jarring to 21st-Century eyes. Percy's characters use the "N-word" freely, and his protagonist's peculiar delusion (one of 'em, anyway) is that North Carolina is being deprived of its Jewish population in some counterfactual reverse Diaspora.

By the same token, though, I found the period and its characters to be well-realized. Percy was a scintillating writer whose characters are always utterly convincing, even when their motivations are opaque and their attitudes abhorrent.

I can envision the film version clearly, though it could never be made as it should be. No script writer, no director would have the courage and restraint necessary to do this necessary thing: to film the novel simply and exactly as written, to record only the characters' actions and dialogue, and never explain any of their internal states through narration, voiceover or any other trick. To let the story tell itself, to trust the actors to act and the audience to interpret. That's vanishingly unlikely to occur in this muddled world.

I didn't enjoy The Second Coming nearly as much as I did Percy's earlier work. That, however, is no strong indictment of the book itself. This one's just a little too dark, a little too close to the bone. This is without a doubt a complex novel and worthy of attention.(less) "