Bond and Beyond Book Club

Chief of SIS wrote:

Good to hear it's just as good as you recalled Harms.

There are some weaknesses, but other elements were stronger than I remembered them being. Can't wait to actually get into discussing it.

Okay, I've finished it.

x

Loomis wrote:

Okay, I've finished it.

Some thoughts?

Well, I thought I'd wait till Santa and others had also finished reading it, but what the heck.

I didn't care for it. Plot-wise, I was vaguely reminded of one of my favourite novels, Sebastian Faulks' ENGLEBY (2007), but while I also enjoyed Percy's turn of phrase (the man definitely knew his way around the English language) and the Louisiana setting I found the whole Southern Gothic/trouble-behind-those-white-picket-fences thing unoriginal and uninteresting.

The so-called big plot revelation is telegraphed pretty much from the first page, and so there's no suspense regarding the depths of madness to which the protagonist eventually descends. Worse, none of the characters came to life for me or had any real credibility. I didn't buy it when Lancelot hands Elgin, a poor college student, the princely (and in those days, erm, emperor-ish) sum of $75,000 and the latter doesn't even bat an eyelid.

Of course, LANCELOT is less a novel than a philosophical treatise, and I suppose it's interesting enough in that regard, but I dunno: I wish it had a bit more to offer. Now, maybe it does and it simply went over my head. I agree with Tom Conoboy's observation: "It is not a novel one could say one enjoys, exactly, but in terms of craft there is much here to admire."* Sadly, though, I don't find anything else to admire beyond Percy's occasionally striking wordsmithery.

*See his report at http://tomconoboy.blogspot.com/2009/04/lancelot-by-walker-percy.html

Loomis wrote:

Well, I thought I'd wait till Santa and others had also finished reading it, but what the heck.

Strike while the iron is hot, I say.

Loomis wrote:

Plot-wise, I was vaguely reminded of one of my favourite novels, Sebastian Faulks' ENGLEBY (2007), but while I also enjoyed Percy's turn of phrase (the man definitely knew his way around the English language) and the Louisiana setting I found the whole Southern Gothic/trouble-behind-those-white-picket-fences thing unoriginal and uninteresting.

It is not original, but Percy understands himself to be a writer within a tradition--he is most explicitly a Southern writer--so he's not looking to be original as much as he is trying to perpetuate a certain mode of storytelling. His fiction is constantly in conversation with the fiction of that region, both the fiction of his contemporaries and his predecessors. So his adoption of certain tropes and ideas plays into that, and LANCELOT can at least be partially seen as his engagement with the dissolution of the Old South.

Of course, that doesn't help if you find it uninteresting and/or poorly executed.

Loomis wrote:

The so-called big plot revelation is telegraphed pretty much from the first page, and so there's no suspense regarding the depths of madness to which the protagonist eventually descends.

I'm not sure Percy intended there to be suspense along that avenue, since he gives away the ending, pretty much, a few pages into chapter 2. He seems to want to derive suspense from the why more than anything. I'm not sure that I quite agree with you that LANCELOT is "less a novel than a philosophical treatise," because of what it implies about what a novel is and isn't, but it is true that meaning, more than anything, is Percy's priority here. So perhaps you could call LANCELOT a whydunit.

Loomis wrote:

Worse, none of the characters came to life for me or had any real credibility.

The Southern Gothic tradition isn't really about "real" characters, per se. So if you're looking for convincing, true-to-life characterizations, you won't really find them here. Both O'Connor, Percy's forebear, and Percy see that distinct, over-the-top exaggeration of human individuals as important to their overarching plan of attack. Here's Percy quoting O'Connor:

"In answer to a question why she created such bizarre characters, she replied that for the near-blind you have to draw very large, simple caricatures."

It's worth noting that that quality made (and makes) O'Connor's fiction highly controversial, with many suggesting that the fiction never becomes more than a pile of grotesques, and so she is liked and loathed in almost equal measure (and, I must confess, O'Connor's fiction does not sit all that well with me, either, even if I do like Percy quite a bit).

Loomis wrote:

I didn't buy it when Lancelot hands Elgin, a poor college student, the princely (and in those days, erm, emperor-ish) sum of $75,000 and the latter doesn't even bat an eyelid.

I think we have to be skeptical about reality when we're getting a spiel from Mr. Lancelot, who's established himself pretty early on to be one to play games and to be something of a liar. That scene ends with Lancelot talking about how it all plays out like a movie, and it's not a terrible stretch to suggest that Lancelot is structuring individuals the way he wants to structure them as author of his own mental "movie." (Indeed, the story has him becoming a filmmaker of sorts, constructing his own narrative out of somewhat obscured video footage.)

But another point-of-view on that moment would probably derive from the relationship between black and white individuals at the time of LANCELOT's writing. Elgin, being a college student, would have been raised in the pre-Civil Rights era and, particularly in relating to the more aristocratic Lamar family, in the more submissive way of dealing with whites by which he consistently engages with Lancelot in the novel; note, especially, that Lancelot introduces Elgin as sitting in the "slave chair, made by slaves for slaves." Elgin's reponse to Lancelot at that moment is consistent with their many interactions throughout the novel, many of which are pretty outrageous. Being handed $75,000, given all that has preceded that moment, might not appear all that shocking. Furthermore, Elgin may harbor some resentment toward Lancelot--Lancelot's condescension toward Elgin is thinly-veiled in his narration--and see himself somewhat entitled to the money as a form of restitution.

Harmsway wrote:

Loomis wrote:

The so-called big plot revelation is telegraphed pretty much from the first page, and so there's no suspense regarding the depths of madness to which the protagonist eventually descends.

I'm not sure Percy intended there to be suspense along that avenue, since he gives away the ending, pretty much, a few pages into chapter 2. He seems to want to derive suspense from the why more than anything.

Okay, but I never found the "why" any more of a mystery than the "what".

Harmsway wrote:

I think we have to be skeptical about reality when we're getting a spiel from Mr. Lancelot, who's established himself pretty early on to be one to play games and to be something of a liar. That scene ends with Lancelot talking about how it all plays out like a movie, and it's not a terrible stretch to suggest that Lancelot is structuring individuals the way he wants to structure them as author of his own mental "movie."

Fair point, and, yes, it's also true that it isn't the first time we've seen Lancelot and Elgin interact in a way that seems highly improbable.

I've finished it, too. It was intriguing up to a point, but in the end not really my cup of tea. A lot of the philosophising was due to Lancelot rationalising his deeds, but I didn't really see the point. It's not clear of his account is to be trusted. But then, why should he lie? On the other hand some of his tale just doesn't ring true, the money for his employee, the dialogue he recalls that is really explanation and probably didn't happen the way Lancelot tells his friend. There is some scary atmosphere when Lancelot prepares for his strike, but in the end it's just a cheated husband and father who loses all control and tries to find some hidden meaning in the events. It was a fascinating read, but more in the way one would observe a traffic accident without a means to prevent it. It not a pleasant book, neither the characters nor the plot. Towards the end it became an effort because the outcome is already clear and the only remaining question is how bad it would get on the page.

Well, that's Loomis and Kennon both weighing in with a "not for me."

Perhaps it might be of interest if I shared some quotes from Percy, both about LANCELOT and other concerns which run through his work. Naturally, a spoiler alert applies.

From 'An Interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy' wrote:

PERCY: Lancelot might have come from an upside-down theological notion, not about God but about sin, more specifically the falling into disrepute of the word “sin.” So it seemed entirely fitting that Lancelot, a proper Southern gent raised in a long tradition of knightly virtues, chiefly by way of Walter Scott, the most widely read novelist in the South for a hundred years, should have undertaken his own sort of quest for his own peculiar Grail, i.e., sin, which quest is, after all, a sort of search for God. Lancelot wouldn’t be caught dead looking for God, but he is endlessly intrigued by the search for evil. Is there such a thing--malevolence over and beyond psychological and sociological categories? The miscarriage of his search issues, quite logically I think, in his own peculiar brand of fascism, which is far more attractive and seductive, I think, than Huey Long’s.

ZAN: Is it correct to say that your oevure forms an organic whole and that there is a consistent logic that takes you from one work to the next as you explore reality step by step?

PERCY: Yes, I hope so--though the organic quality, if there is any, occurred more by happenstance than by design. The “fruits of the search” are there--to the extent they are allowed in the modest enterprise of the novel. That is to say, the novelist has no business setting up as the Answer Man. Or, as Binx says in the epilogue of The Moviegoer: “As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters . . .”

But the novelist is entitled to a degree of artifice and cunning, as Joyce said; or the “indirect method,” as Kierkegaard said; or the comic-bizarre shock therapy, as Flannery O’Connor did . . . In Lancelot the resolution of the conflict between Lancelot and Percival is given by a single word, the last word in the book. Which holds out hope for Lancelot.

ZAN: Hope in what sense? Isn’t he beyond reach for Percival anyway?

PERCY: No. Lancelot is not beyond the reach of Percival and, accordingly, Lancelot is not beyond hope. The entire novel is Lancelot’s spiel to Percival. Percival does not in the novel reply in kind. At the end Lancelot asks him if he has anything to say. Percival merely says yes. Lancelot, presumably, will listen. It is precisely my perception of the aesthetic limitations of the novel form that this is all Percival can say. But the novelist is allowed to nourish the secret hope that the reader may remember that in the legend it was only Percival and Lancelot, of all the knights, who saw the Grail.

From 'Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time' wrote:

And if it is the novelist’s business to look and see what there is for everyone to see but is nonetheless not seen, and if the novelist is by his very nature a hopeful man--he has to be hopeful or he would not bother to write at all--then sooner or later he must confront the great paradox of the twentieth century: that no other time has been more life-affirming in its pronouncements, self-fulfilling, creative, autonomous, and so on--and more death-dealing in its actions. It is the century of the love of death. I am not talking just about Verdun or the Holocaust or Hiroshima. I am talking about a subtler form of death, a death in life, of people who seem to be living lives which are good by all sociological standards and yet who somehow seem more dead than alive. Whenever you have a hundred thousand psychotherapists talking about being life-affirming and a million books about life-enrichment, you can be sure there is a lot of death around.

From 'The State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science?' wrote:

Something, it appears, has gone wrong with the Western world, and gone wrong in a sense far more radical than, say, the evils of industrial England which enraged Dickens. It did not take a diagnostician to locate the evils of the sweatshops of the nineteenth-century Midlands. But now it seems that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of meaning itself, the very ways people see and understand themselves. What is called into question in novels now is the very enterprise of human life itself. Instead of writing about this or that social evil from a posture of consensus from which we agree to deplore social evils, it is now the consensus itself and the posture which are called into question. This state of affairs creates problems for the novelist. For in order to create a literature, whether of celebration or dissent, a certain shared universe of discourse is required. It is now these very shared assumptions which are called into question. Forty years ago Steinbeck had an easy job writing about the Okies and the dust bowl. It is a different matter now when the novelist confronts third-generation Okies in California who have won, who seem to have everything they want--and yet who seem ready any minute to slide physically and spiritually into the Pacific Ocean.

So the novelist today is less like the Tolstoy or Fielding or Jane Austen who set forth and celebrated a still intact society, than he is like a somewhat bemused psychiatrist gazing at a patient who in one sense lives in the best of all possible worlds and yet is suffering from a depression and anxiety which he doesn't understand.

I haven't read the post above due to the spoiler alert, as I'm only about a third into the book so far. I haven't come down 100% on one side of the other but let's just say I'm hoping it will get better. I admit the problem is partly with myself - I fully agree with Loomis when he says it's not so much a novel, and that's a problem for me because my mind wanders. As his mind wanders, so does mine and I realise I've read a whole page but actually taken none in, instead I have composed a mental shopping list and have to go back and read the page again. I'm pretty sure I know what's coming but I'm not sure I actually need to know why. There isn't always a why, sometimes shit happens, which would render the whole book redundant but I'm not prepared to write it off just yet. At the moment, though, it feels like Percy is trying too hard.

I'll add that I know nothing about theology or Arthurian literature, and I wonder whether a knowledge of such things would have allowed me to get much more out of Percy's novel. Reading LANCELOT, I also felt that plenty of American cultural nuances were sailing over my head.