This is not to say that Percy is a bad writer, but I've come to expect more from my questionable narrators and post-apocalyptic scenarios. Dec 10, Alex rated it liked it Shelves: This was a weird one. It's satire, surreal, sci fi, I would even call it screwball, but then at times the events and setting don't seem so ungrounded anymore. It just takes place in Louisiana not very far into the future from the novel's publication date of A doctor named Thomas More works on a new 'lapsometer' that can read and influence the emotional state of the mind to some extent.
Perhaps it can improve the state of the country, perhaps it will win him the Nobel prize, or perhaps it wil This was a weird one. Perhaps it can improve the state of the country, perhaps it will win him the Nobel prize, or perhaps it will fall into the wrong hands. He also happens to be Catholic, a very lousy Catholic, a womanizer but never bad enough that he completely leaves the Church.
He keeps his faith with him, and occasionally notices it's value. I honestly have to say the political satire was my favorite part of this. You can tell Percy was writing in the aftermath of the 60s. There's a new Vietnam war in Ecuador. The swamps are populated by black nationalists and bohemians. More is chased by a mysterious sniper I get the impression that this type of situation isn't considered that much out of the ordinary.
Conservatives who believe in faith and country are still around. So are the people that protested Vietnam and voted for George McGovern, continuing to support "Liberty equality I enjoyed the abortion jab aimed at William O. The Church is in ruins as well. An American Catholic Church ACC broke off, to use a picket fenced home as its logo, promote property rights and raise the American flag when the host is being consecrated. There's a lapsed priest working at the psychological clinic, where scientists run 'love' studies as an excuse to watch people have sex.
Sometimes I think certain things are criticized not directly but just as being deliberately portrayed as absurd. As the story carries on, it looks like something big is going to happen on July 4th, the president is going to be in town. It's not said exactly what for. Perhaps an important conference? Will guerillas attack him?
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In the end he arrives in town to participate in the community's nationally renowned golf scene, and the sand traps catch on fire, somehow apparently causing an environmental catastrophe, and I think this had something to do with a mysterious yellow cloud mentioned earlier? Percy is very Catholic, obviously well educated in the matter, and also traditional. There's even a lament for the loss of the Latin Mass. I don't know that the plot went very far.
Actually I'm not sure where it went at all, but there were important points made here and there, and I agreed with them. Out of all the Catholic novels I've read this has been the most unique one. May 12, S rated it liked it. My friend Grieg said that Percy was trying to do what O'Connor did successfully. I suspect this statement is true. But behind it is another statement: No doubt the latter is more effective, but I feel like the former is probably more fun.
My friend Nathan said he didn't see the point to this novel. I'm afraid it's true: Moore ends up in a similar predicament as he was in prior to the death of his daughter. It is neat though when the government-big-business-liaison guy is banished with Dr. More's prayer to St. Thomas More, his namesake. The smartest part of the novel, and the coolest sf-conceit presented in the text, is Dr. Narratively speaking, it functions as a quick and deep characterization device.
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Philosophically, it is a striking assessment of contemporary psychological ills. Jul 20, booklady marked it as backburner Recommended to booklady by: I went to meet Percy in His most important book is a collection of philosophical essays entitled The Message in the Bottle.
The entire goal of his writing was to show how the historical events of Christian history constituted a "message" which brought life to people who were in the posi Robert Moynihan, reporting from Rome, "Inside the Vatican Magazine" Newsflash, Letter from Rome, The entire goal of his writing was to show how the historical events of Christian history constituted a "message" which brought life to people who were in the position of "castaways" on a desert island, waiting for a message that could help them in their plight to wash up on the beach And he did not write didactically, as if to say, "this is the message, here is part one, here is part two, you must believe this point, and this point, and also this other point Dec 27, William Randolph rated it really liked it Shelves: This is certainly a strange book.
I read this just after reading Peter Augustine Lawler's Postmodernism Rightly Understood , which cleared up the philosophy behind the book. My general impression is that in this book Percy is settling into a didactic mode, which I don't mind since I find the theory interesting. Generally, it seems like the actions of Percy's protagonists are inco This is certainly a strange book.
Generally, it seems like the actions of Percy's protagonists are incomprehensible apart from some philosophical context, but if you've got that, then the books can be a great deal of fun—and edifying, too. May 13, Jerod H rated it liked it. A quirky, absurdest, medical comedy set against the backdrop of the real-life oddity that is south Louisiana culture. An African American uprising, a sex laboratory with a "panic" room , college educated hippies living in the swamp, a sniper in the abandoned golf club house, polygamy, Early Times whiskey Tom More encounters during the 3 day period over which the novel takes place.
With sharp wit and sound wisdom, Percy explores the f A quirky, absurdest, medical comedy set against the backdrop of the real-life oddity that is south Louisiana culture. With sharp wit and sound wisdom, Percy explores the futile ways in which people search for healing and redemption in the "Christ-haunted" United States of America. Nov 15, Connie rated it it was ok. A couple of years ago I read a lot of Walker Percy and loved his books. Reading Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World now shows me again that there are times and conditions that are right or wrong for certain books.
I'd started it after a reference to it in somebody's essay somewhere. I didn't quite slot it in my "ugh" sub shelves because, after all, Walker Percy. But A couple of years ago I read a lot of Walker Percy and loved his books. But this is not a time for me to read dystopia and cartoonish characters. Oh, full disclosure, I read the last page too.
Do not expect to take this book up again. Mar 29, Scott Hutchins rated it it was amazing Shelves: But Love in the Ruins is the first book I ever read by Percy, and I thought it was the smartest, funniest, oddest book--all dressed up in this hilarious country-club Southern accent. The world the late 60s is divided into Knotheads conservatives in a delusional rage and the Leftpapasanes ineffective, muddied liberals.
There's a great line: However, the Gross National Product continues to rise. I have no idea what in the world I just read At once philosophical study, religious treatise, and apocalyptic fiction, Love in the Ruins extrapolates modern society to its conclusion and envisions a hyperbolic United States on the eve of its own destruction. With constant wit, undeniable charm, and a pithy grasp of what constitutes the modern United States, Walker Percy lays bare the ills of society and intimates deftly at their solutions. Love in the Ruins is fundamentally satirical, and is really less about the apocalypse than it is set At once philosophical study, religious treatise, and apocalyptic fiction, Love in the Ruins extrapolates modern society to its conclusion and envisions a hyperbolic United States on the eve of its own destruction.
Love in the Ruins is fundamentally satirical, and is really less about the apocalypse than it is set in the apocalypse: I would recommend Love in the Ruins to any fans of cerebral fiction. Fans of Percy will find a great deal to love, and those interested in an approach to this important Southern author might find Love in the Ruins more approachable than some of his more esoteric works. Jul 01, Genevieve rated it liked it. Well-written and it kept moving, but the story was too oddball for me and I couldn't enjoy it.
May 15, Rhonda rated it really liked it Shelves: This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Walker Percy writes one of the most gleefully enjoyable books I have read in quite a while and I do not say this lightly. There were few pages where I did not find myself either laughing to myself or, sometimes, pausing to laugh out loud and copy down a word or phrase. It was truly a gift to read this book at a time such as this. I do not mean to say this was only a funny book.
The author is far too serious a writer to write sentimental drivel or humorous pap. Moreover, one either has to be reas Walker Percy writes one of the most gleefully enjoyable books I have read in quite a while and I do not say this lightly. Moreover, one either has to be reasonably well educated or, as I have discovered in leading book reviews locally, you can just read over the esoterica which is rather enjoyable.
I always believed that education was far more enjoyable beyond any level of snob appeal, but I appear to be in the minority lately. Nevertheless, I stop slightly short of calling it prophetic. Oh, what the hell?
Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
Let's go ahead and coin a phrase and call him a comical prophet. The more you understand the images intimately from classical literature, the better off one will be. One issue which I am ashamed to admit was that I had to research any number of medical issues mentioned in the book. It seems that the author actually graduated from medical school and, since the narrator is a psychiatrist, he often speaks of arcane medical terms and freely uses apparently accurate medical terminology. There are, of course, limitations, such as in the author's inventions, but it is nevertheless tongue-in-cheek medically plausible.
It is difficult to say just what this book is about. However, imagine a period of time in which the United States were catastrophically split into two contrasting political groups and they lived with a constantly uneasy truce, as such. Now imagine, further, that in the anger and hostility of both sides for the other, individuals had lost their real capacities to be and act like human beings.
The narrator suggests that they have lost their souls Now imagine that this is from a time period around and the United States has just undergone a tremendous upheaval, a great deal of the electric grid is not functioning, the population has become so factioned that one has to be careful where one lives and one gathers that the populations has been severely decreased. It is a veritable setting for the Twilight Zone and nature is attempting to take back what civilization had built for the last fifty years. You are also stuck somewhere in Louisiana with no real mention of the unbearable humidity.
This book was written in , a time of political upheaval in the United States and elsewhere, the war in Viet Nam and a huge split beginning in political outlook beginning. Percy is not so much detailing these things as he is he making fun of a fictional world in which all of this has come to a head and caused a revolution of sorts in which the country is completely divided between the liberal PAPASANS and the conservative Knotheads.
Each is a parody of itself, it goes without saying. Both political parties had their triumphs. The Knotheads enacted a law requiring compulsory prayers in the black public schools and made funds available for birth control in Africa, Asia, and Alabama. I found this hilarious, albeit the part about birth control in Alabama kind of hits home. If you have ever spent more than a few days there, you probably understand.
But what precipitates this civil war in which the world that was once the mighty United States now finds itself embattled and forlorn by political strife and enigma? Well, the narrator, whose name is Thomas More, no relation to the great saint, to whom is he often compares himself and his situation, only says that the outcome has resulted in this uneasy truce of polarization which has resulted in a ridiculousness beyond the capacity of this review to explain. Nevertheless, it is both silly, sad, painful and very very funny.
The oddity, however, is that it is almost like holding up a mirror to the present day. The author prophetically explains the origins in both a profound and irreverent paragraph. Was it the nigger business from the beginning? What a bad joke: God saying, here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you're the apple of my eye; because you the lordly Westerners, the fierce, Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish event even though you were nowhere near it and had to hear the news of it from strangers.
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But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you Israel and Greece and science and art and the lordship of the earth, and finally even gave you the new world that I blessed for you. And all you had to do was pass this one little test, which was surely child's play for you because you had already passed the big one. But enough of the background theory. The story line which keeps the reader moving forward is simple enough although it includes any number of different side paths. It comes down to this. Convinced that some sort of cataclysmic event is going to happen on July 4, Dr. Thomas More has managed to stockpile 6 months of food, water, whiskey and literature.
Our good doctor is like Noah, setting up an ark in an hotel room of a derelict Howard Johnsons. In this ark, he has planned to keep three women with whom he thinks he might be in love, and they with him! He has created relationships with each of them in separate ways and now plans to bring them together with the announcement of the great impending danger. One can only imagine keeping three women in derelict hotel rooms, especially three with whom one was I thought this was all very funny.
There are various parts of this which are intentionally ridiculous, even in terms of male fantasy.
It was the way in which the author had so much fun that made one laugh. Sometimes it was Euripides and sometimes it was bordering on slapstick! The narrator borders on being unreliable, partly because he is telling the reader about all of his bad habits, mostly drinking whiskey and chasing women, but also his history, watching his beloved child die of a disease no one could cure and then having his wife leave him because her heart was simply broken and she couldn't love him any more. He is, one finds, a rather tragic case, and yet in many ways stalwart about his ideals about life and, perhaps, his ruminations about God.
Intertwined, of course, and there is no great magic about this, one supposes, is the great tedium of male fantasy worlds Thomas More is, more than anything else, a doctor, a psychiatrist, one who wrestles with the keys to man's soul insofar as God will allow him the glimpses into it. He is considered quite brilliant in general but specifically for a device which he has invented, something which he hopes will revolutionize not only the psychiatric field of medicine, but essentially repair the damage that has been done to people by themselves. He has great hopes that his brain stimulator will be able to one day stabilize mankind to the point where it can get along with itself.
In the meantime, however, the good doctor is a severely damaged soul himself, usually in search of either Early Times bourbon or an attractive young lady. He says of himself: I, for example, am a Roman Catholic, albeit a bad one I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth and my fellowman hardly at all. Generally I do as I please.
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A man, wrote John, who says he believes in God and does not keep the commandments is a liar. If John is right, then I am a liar. Nevertheless, I still believe. I suppose I have a weak spot for people who readily admit their internal conflicts. Of course, everyone pretty much admits internal conflicts when he is drinking, some of which don't even exist, but you can't help but like the doctor.
He is a psychiatrist who has spent time in the mental ward at the hospital, self-entered of course, but who should recognize poor mental health better than a psychiatrist? Of course as we read the book, that becomes part of the joke, but there are revelations, nonetheless. The first night I ever spent in on the acute ward, a madman looked at to and said, not knowing to from Adam: You don't love God, you love pussy.
Madmen like possessed men usually tell the truth. He seems to have a grasp on this issue, madmen, I mean, rather than feminine nether regions, and repeats it on several occasions to great effect, Madmen, like possessed souls in the Gospels, know when you are telling the truth. As for women, he has an odd view of them too, one which I find gleefully delightful.
Women are mythical creatures. They have no more connection with the ordinary run of things than do centaurs. I have to admit to being abnormally fond of this observation, even if I find it a bit overly poetic. At least he is fond of women, clearly an idealist but he wrestles with the idea of relationships. Since his wife has left him, his relations seem aberrational in that he is trying to have sex with most of the moderately interesting women he meets.
Of course this is doubly funny because he is, after all a psychiatrist. The book is written as if all the jokes are played on the characters themselves and the reader has to be quick witted enough to be able to catch the scene as it passes through. Once again, being literate helps. I would like to summarize so many great observations that I found in this book. Indeed, I had every intention to do so when I sat down to write this review.
However, I realize now that I would be telling incoherent stories about episodes which would make little or no sense to the reader. It is best that the reader understand that although I don't think that Walker Percy can write an ending to any of his books that is truly magnificent, one worthy of his stories, this book is magnificent in itself, filled with issues to ponder for days as I did and worthy of laughter for hours.
It follows its main character, Dr Thomas More, namesake and descendant of Sir Thomas More author of Utopia , a psychiatrist in a small town in Louisiana called Paradise. Over time, the U.
Love in the Ruins
Society begins to come apart at the seams, and no one except More seems to notice, and no one, including him, seems particularly to care. More, a lapsed Catholic , alcoholic, and womanizer, invents a device that he names the Ontological Lapsometer, which can diagnose and treat the harmful mental states at the root of society's slow disintegration. However, in the wrong hands, the device can also exacerbate the problems, and a government representative, intent on getting More a Nobel Prize , seeks to put it to his own uses while More attempts to prevent a disaster.
The novel investigates and satirizes many facets of American society, including religion, sexuality, medical and scientific ethics, and race relations. As in many of Percy's other works, among them The Moviegoer , The Second Coming , and The Last Gentleman , the novel's protagonist suffers from alienation and existential doubt. But the protagonists' detachment from themselves allows for a lighter tone and often a comic distance from the world. Dr More's hyper-fragmented community allows for comic caricatures while still reflecting on the roots of society's problems.
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