Guidebook for Lost Pilgrims

THE LAST GENTLEMAN by Walker Percy. 409 pages. Farrar, Straus & G/Voux. $5.95.

The Moviegoer, it seems, has a brilliant kid brother. Walker Percy's first novel, which won the National Book Award in 1962, tells the story of a likable young New Orleans stockbroker who escapes the meaninglessness of modern life by going to the movies. The Last Gentleman, his second novel, tells the story of a likable young Mississippian who escapes the meaninglessness of modern life by falling into fits of amnesia and daydreams. Like the earlier book, Gentleman recounts an anti-hero's battle against involvement. But it is sturdier in substance, more supple in style than The Moviegoer, and it shimmers even more brightly with the chaste and civilized ornaments of irony, understatement and compassion.

Woes & Wiles. Williston Bibb Barrett is an oversubtle Southerner who has lost the gift for action and adopted instead the stance of watcher, listener and wanderer. During his junior year at Princeton, he is overwhelmed by the mindless undergraduate decorum of the place and flees to New York, a room at the Y, and five years of psychoanalysis. Nights, he works three levels below ground as a humidification engineer for Macy's. Days, he plays up in Central Park at putting reality into perspective. He sets up a telescope and peeps at the passing show from behind a screen of greenery. What he sees on a distant park bench eventually lures him out back to where the action is. "It was not so much her good looks, her smooth-brushed brow and firm round neck bowed so that two or three vertebrae surfaced in the soft flesh, as a certain bemused and dry-eyed expression in which he seemed to recognize --himself! She was his better half."

He tracks her down--or rather up--to a hospital in Washington Heights, discovers she belongs to a cheerful, go-getting family of fellow Southerners, signs on as companion to her 16-year-old brother Jamie, who is ill with leukemia, and swings off with the family on a southbound safari that is taking the patient home to die.

The book's slight remaining plot teases the reader into wondering not "What will happen next?" but "What is really happening now?" What is happening is that Percy is using his plot as a witty excuse for exploring the wilder woes and wiles of Southern Negro servants, Northern liberal busybodies, professional religionists, disenchanted humanists ("Being geniuses of the orgasm is far more demanding than Calvinism"), and, most entertainingly of all, the subtle differences in outlook between the North and South.

Returning South, Williston Barrett is "disconcerted" by the "happiness and serenity" that he finds. "He had felt good in the North because everyone else felt so bad." Northerners "were solitary and shut-off to themselves . . . Their cities, rich and busy as they were, nevertheless looked bombed out." By contrast, the happiness of the South was "almost invincible. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain. Their happiness was aggressive and irresistible. He was determined to be as happy as anyone. If folks down here are happy and at home, he told himself, then I shall be happy and at home too."

Poised & Patient. On the evidence of this meditative, almost allegorical book, nothing need be counted as lost --not innocence, nor goodness, nor joy --because it has not really been possessed. The comedy, if not divine, is serene, mellow, poised and patient. Like The Moviegoer, this novel will probably be widely praised as a cautionary tale against escapism and fantasies. The real point is rather different. Underlying the deceptively mild tone of the book is a restless rustling of faith, under the ironic humor and serenity a groping toward God. Williston Barrett's aim "to marry him a wife and live him a life" is essentially symbolic of his willingness to act, to give shape and substance to time, to forsake his childish dream of infinite possibilities. Walker Percy suggests that the infinite is possible, and that it goes by the name of God.

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