Comments on: Getting Lost in Percy’s Cosmos

By: Peter Lawler

Peter Lawler — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:54:40 +0000

Great topic, of course. The exhaustion of language is a great opportunity for the novelist.
Percy wasn’t a “decline and fall man” and my opinion he becomes less dark. LANCELOT I’m told is a very Voegelian book, and it’s certainly anti-gnostic. THE THANATOS SYNDROME is anti-romantic, among other things. LOVE IN THE RUINS should be read with the last part of the sci-fi ending of LOST IN THE COMOS about the reality of love in the ruins and the end of pop Cartesian loneliness…

By: Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:44:14 +0000

Bob Dylan has a line, “..no direction home,” that may be an element in Ms. Flannery’s work. I just happen to be re-reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (and I’m looking but can’t remember where I placed the darn book!), and while I’ve always thought that Flannery was critiquing modernity, your blog comments are directing me toward a more differentiated analysis, namely that she was concerned with portraying the individual/personal corruption and the collapse of man’s necessary apperceptive abilities while living in a condition/state of sin. In choosing to ‘sin’ Flannery shows us that anything (grotesqueries) is possible/justified including murder, torture, rape, ….as long as the self is sated!
Jason, great post!

By: Carl Eric Scott

Carl Eric Scott — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 05:21:03 +0000

My favorite of the Percy novels is the loopy Love in the Ruins. Something about the idea of late-60s-style societal break-down being fought out on golf courses appeals to my suburban soul. The Moviegoer has plenty of priceless moments, but I find it hard to get fully on board with Binx’s angst/alienation. The later companion to Love in the Ruins, The Thanatos Syndrome, is perhaps the one to start with, because it really works as a mystery thriller, and it seems to be all that’s great in Percy but in presented in a more subtle way. Ideas that seem a bit extremist or zany in the other novels come across in it as fully plausible. Of course, that makes some of them creepier.

Haven’t read Lancelot or The Second Coming.