Driving through the Gentilly section of New Orleans, the setting of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, I wondered what Percy would think had he lived to see the neighborhood here utterly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. With piles of debris and emptied streets, Gentilly resembles more one of Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic-dystopian fictions than one of Percy’s apocalyptic-but-hopeful volumes.
No doubt Percy would have written an essay explaining what both the post-Katrina chaos in the Superdome and the post-Katrina neighbor love in the surrounding communities tell us about human nature, human sin, human dignity, and the quest for God.
One wonders further what Percy might have said about current debates over embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and the attempt to bio-chemically alter human nature through medicines designed to numb sadness and to deaden guilt. Truth is, most of these things Percy already wrote about, because he saw them coming, from his little room in Covington, Louisiana, long before they arrived.
On May 28th, Walker Percy would be ninety years old. Perhaps it is appropriate for those who loved his life and work to thank God for giving us such a quirky prophet. Perhaps this weekend would be a good time for those of us who have been shaped by Percy’s writings to give a copy of one of his books to a younger Christian. By my lights, The Moviegoer is the best of Percy’s fiction, and Signposts in a Strange Land is the best collection of his essays. The collection of letters between Percy and his best friend, the unbelieving but brilliant historian Shelby Foote, is also a good place to start to understand Percy the man.
Gentilly lies in debris. Shelby Foote is now dead too. Self-help books still abound. Thanatos Syndrome-like scientists are still feverishly at work in the search for a chemically-accessible Eden. Read some Percy today in honor of his birthday. And then thank God for the good doctor’s reminder to us that even when there is a wasteland everywhere around us, there is love in the ruins still.
