Micah Mattix considers the legacy of novelist Walker Percy:
Along with Flannery O’Connor, he is often considered one of the leading Catholic writers of the South in the twentieth century. His work—from the National Book Award winning The Moviegoer to the fast-paced The Thanatos Syndrome—captures the malaise and potential absurdity and horror of a post-Christian America with compassionate aplomb. Yet, while interest in O’Connor continues to grow, interest in Percy has plateaued somewhat. There is, of course, the new Walker Percy Center at Loyola University in New Orleans, and, hopefully, the soon to be completed film by Win Riley, but according to these and other measures—works of criticism, biographies, and collected works—the day clearly belongs to O’Connor.
But why?
Also, David Goldman asks, “Who Will Bail Out the Bailer-Outers?”
Just when we were told that the governments and central banks of the world had put the financial crisis behind us, the governments of Europe found it necessary to commit more than a trillion dollars to support of the financial system – a $962 billion facility to support the weak periphery of the Eurozone, plus an unspecified volume of outright purchases of government bonds by the European Central Bank as well as Germany’s Bundesbank, not to mention an emergency swap facility by which the Federal Reserve will lend Europe all the dollars it requires.
May 10th, 2010 | 2:31 pm
I’ve read more O’Connor than Percy, so take this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see why this is such cause for surprise. O’Connor has a more distinctive style and is less didactic. It pains me to say that Percy is didactic at all, but in his lesser works he is, at least a bit. In the Thanatos Syndrome, for example, the plot resolves only because the villains on the edge of world domination and psychic destruction of humanity happen to be sexual abusers of children who are as sloppy about concealing the evidence thereof as they are ruthless and brilliant in their overall plans – of course Percy was making a point, but as a plot device it’s a little too convenient and makes the point didactic. Is anything in O’Connor a convenient plot device? I’m hard pressed to think of an example. I would argue that her prose is simply of a higher quality as well, but others may think differently, I suppose.