Re-reading The Last Gentleman

I recently finished re-reading Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman.

I first read it in 1992, during the first six months I lived in Berkeley, California. In that six months I worked my way through all six of Percy's novels in order. I decided to pick it up again when I came across this quote:

"...he came to see that he was not destined to do everything but only one or two things. Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him."

In retrospect I think I was feeling a lot like Will Barrett, the novel's hero, back in '92. That may be why the novel meant so much to me at the time. Barrett was subject to fugue states, deja-vus and general mental instability and in search of some kind of salvation. He spends the novel on the move from New York, to Mississippi and out to Santa Fe. I was recently divorced and dislocated, and had just spent much of the previous six months gradually drifting west from the Midwest (and fully expecting to move away in the next few weeks).

Re-reading a book after so much time tells you almost as much about yourself.

Fifteen years later, I'm surprised to discover that I'd pretty much forgotten the last third of the book (the Santa Fe section).

I'm also surprised how tedious I now find the philosophical arguments between Sutter and Val. (See this post by Fred for more on that theme.) I still agree with Percy on this: "Whereas and in fact my problem is how to live from one ordinary minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon." (Percy was so fond of the idea that he repeated it at least once in every book he ever wrote.)

Percy's descriptive writing strikes me as gloriously rich, but his North-South dialectic now strikes me as simplistic and even quaint. America, in my experience of it, seems to be so much more complex.