Rating: 
Summary: Understanding a gentleman's rage
Review: Walker Percy immediately became my favorite author after I read this novel. I subsequently embarked on a quest to read every word the man had written. Percy presents the ultimate choice to any moral person living in this age: It will be Lancelot's way or Percival's. Find out which suits you . . .
Rating:
Summary: Tackling Evil
Review: Walker Percy really tackles evil in this, perhaps, his finest novel. He let his demons take center stage, and the dark, brooding novel emerges for what it most certainly is, a stupendous moral examination of our culture. Lancelot is not his most widely read work, for I suspect, this very reason. One need only look at the recent tragedy in Littleton to see why. All the grief counselors and therapists attempt to explain the unexplainable. Unfortunately, since we have lost a moral speech, we can't call a spade a spade. Evil has disappeared from our lexicon and at grave cost. How appripos Percy has Lance mouth words typical of the novelist. You know he sympathizes with him-- in fact he is the sort of person Percy feared he might have become, if not for his faith, yet the moralist makes Lance the personification of pure evil. The priest-confessor, his quite solemnity hovering throughout the novel, harkens to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, when Christ returned to view the modern world. The ideas here are so out of touch with our present Zeitgeist that most critics missed the central importance of this novel. One critic called it a brilliant "jeremiad." Lancelot is much more, and I pray the day comes when we recognize what Percy was saying.
Rating:
Summary: I hope no one's forgotten that Lancelot is a nutcase
Review: Well, I can't deny that this is a great book, but it kind of worries me that certain other reviewers seem to be taking Lancelot's statements at face value...I mean, come on, the guy is a pretty awful person. Percy takes considerable pains to distance himself from the narrator, giving his name to Lance's audience and double (Perceval) instead. Not that that madness diminishes the book. Lancelot's rants (which comprise the whole novel) are brilliant, though clearly mad; and the flashback nature of the plot lets Percy drop plenty of hints that something horrible has happened without giving away what it was (always a fun technique). The format of the book is an extended monologue, with Lance speaking to a silent Perceval. Some of the reminders of Perceval's physical presence (when Lance offers him a chair, for example, or reacts to something Perceval has supposedly said) can grow irritating, but they do build up to a wonderul ending. The Perceval of the grail legend remains silent too long, but that's a mistake he's not about to make twice. Walker Percy only has two or three subjects he ever considers important enough to write about, and some readers might be sick of them by now, but Lancelot's madness gives Percy an opportunity to exaggerate and warp his usual themes till they look new again.
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