Will I love Love in the Ruins?

I read this book every year. In my opinion, Walker Percy, along with Flannery O’Connor, is the premiere southern novelist of the last half of the 20th Century. I consider it one of the finest novels written and an example of the plotting, character development, use of language, and religious parody to which young novelists should aspire.

Percy’s novel blends Southern Gothic, science fiction, and comedy to create a world in which the racial divide in New Orleans blossoms into an apocalypse with hilarious and unpredictable results.

Percy wrote this comic take on the dissolution of American society in the late 1960s, but his apocalyptic descriptions of a galvanized and fragmented citizenry now seem almost prophetic.

The protagonist, Dr. Thomas More (a descendant of Sir Thomas More), is a brilliant doctor and inventor who is also a drunk, a melancholic, and a womanizer. While I am only one of those (I’m not telling you which), I related to More’s psychological profile and general attitude perhaps more than to any other fictitious character with which I am familiar.

Love in the Ruins is a book with several LOL… show more.

I don’t read many novels – my work doesn’t leave me much time – but I’ve had to make time for Percy.

His novels are full of intriguing characters, vivid and natural dialogue, and masterfully controlled plots; and in both his fiction and his essays and interviews he offers a trenchant diagnosis of the ills of modern life. Love in the Ruins is borderline sci-fi and quasi-apocalyptic.

Its protagonist, Tom More (a proud if decadent descendant of Sir and Saint Thomas More) lives in an American society much like our own, which is on the verge of collapse even though… show more.

A Confederacy of Dunces might have never seen the light of day if Toole’s mother hadn’t mailed the only existing typescript to Walker Percy, the one person in the world best suited to appreciate it, because Percy (like Toole) was a brilliant comic novelist from Louisiana.  

No author frustrates me more than Percy. Of his six novels, there are three I love, and three I hate—and I have issues even with the ones I love. But I keep coming back to Percy because he writes like no one else (in large part, I think, due to his background as a… show more.