THE LAST GENTLEMAN by Walker Percy

Mo 5/13/24 Went on to something else {'TOTAL CONTROL' by David Baldacci}

I got this book from the library as an E-book via Hoopla. I read almost 200 pags and then decided to drop it. 

It wasn't bad, just not good. I really want to read 'THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy.

***As I was typing this entry I noticed that 'THE MOVIEGOER' is on sale at Amazon for under six bucks. I ordered it immediately. 

' The Last Gentleman' concerns a young 'good' man who is befriended by a strange family. Some interesting incidents and some nice writing, but I just ran out of steam. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reveiws:

"Walker Percy's The Moviegoer was the rather unexpected National Book Award winner in 1961. His last gentleman suffers from the same contemporary malaise — a kind of dislocation. He is Bill Barrett, an amiable, anomalous young man from an old Southern family. He had gone North to find himself equally homeless and aimless. Some of this is externalized by the fact that he has "fugue states," amnestic spells, as well as moments of deja vu. They are all just symptomatic of his ambiguity and detachment. Whereas his moviegoer prowled, Bill is a "watcher, a listener and a wanderer." In moments of greater clarity or resolution he thinks about marrying Kitty and settling for the happy, useful life. Meantime he becomes involved, insofar as he can, with Kitty's family, the Vaughts: her predatory sister-in-law Rita; her younger brother, Jaimie, who is dying of leukemia; and Sutter Vaught, Rita's husband, a doctor whose casebook provides some savage soundings on civilization— religion, race, concupiscence, sin, etc. These give a harder satiric edge to the book than was achieved in the earlier one; so does the final scene, the death watch over Jaimie, which is certainly powerful. But there are times when following Walker Percy is a little like trying to catch your shadow. On the other hand he writes about his elusive young man and his elliptical world in such matter of fact prose and with seemingly random details which are actually, intentionally, a commentary on modern life and all its flimsy props. This gives the book much of its contrast and interest.... Attention seems assured if agreement over some of the implications less likely."