Questing After An Unholy Grail

By Paul Gray

LANCELOT

by WALKER PERCY

257 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$8.95.

Although he has been called a novelist of ideas, Walker Percy, 60, is less a philosopher than a physician to the public weal. Tuberculosis prevented him from using the M.D. he earned in 1941, but The Moviegoer (1962), Percy's first novel and a National Book Award winner, demonstrated his remarkable diagnostic skill. In it and two later novels, he specialized in asking probing questions: Why are people with every outward trapping of happiness so miserable? Where and why does it hurt?

Lancelot Andrewes Lamar is Percy's most painful case to date. A Rhodes scholar and onetime football hero, he goes to seed in classic Southern style. He takes up the law, drink and the care of a rundown showplace home near New Orleans. Only when he suspects the infidelity of his second wife, Margot, a brassy Texan worth $10 million, does Lancelot realize what he has made of his life: "I had done nothing but fiddle at law, fiddle at history, keep up with the news (why?), watch Mary Tyler Moore, and drink myself into unconsciousness every night."

Flagrante Delicto. Not any longer. Lancelot changes overnight from a catatonic lush into a quixotic detective. Proving Margot's waywardness is the least of his worries; her suspected lover is the director of a Hollywood film crew currently making a movie at Lancelot's picturesque mansion. With unlimited funds and the help of a black M.I.T. student who is an electronics wizard, Lancelot has no trouble assembling incriminating video tapes. But he wants more than to film Margot flagrante delicto. Lancelot is on the trail of evil and an affirmation that it still has meaning. Says he: " 'Evil' is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone's either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil."

Lancelot's pursuit of what he calls "the Unholy Grail" leads him to commit several murders and arson. He, in turn, is committed to a New Orleans insane asylum, where he has one room with a view of Lafayette Cemetery. There he tells his story to a friend who has become a Catholic priest. But Lancelot's confession is anything but repentant. It is both a funny and a scarifying jeremiad on the modern age.

Lunatics with apocalyptic visions can be wearisome. Thanks to Percy's inventiveness and rapid pacing, Lancelot is not. In fact, he often sounds like a man playing out a symphony of Dostoyevskian experiences on a kazoo: "Did you know that the South and for all I know the entire U.S.A. is full of demonic women who, driven by as yet unnamed furies, are desperately restoring and preserving places, buildings?" He tosses off witty remarks about the vacuities of Hollywood and about the strange things that occur when the film crew sets up in his town: "What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions "

Percy, of course, made this very observation the theme of The Moviegoer. Lancelot frequently says things that the author has written elsewhere, especially in The Message in the Bottle (1975), a collection of essays on the oddities of language and mankind. Because Percy and Lancelot share some opinions, there will inevitably be those who assume that they agree on everything. And since Lancelot utters enough reactionary claptrap to offend everyone, Percy is likely to get a lot of angry mail, particularly from women. Says Lancelot: "What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center of life: that their happiness and the meaning of life itself is to be assaulted by a man."

Swiftian Disgust. Percy does not fully avoid liability for such beliefs. He clearly uses Lancelot's Swiftian disgust at the "whorehouse and fagdom of America" to score points against contemporary permissiveness. One sometimes wonders just how loony Percy's hero is intended to be. Is it probable that a canny good ole boy like Lancelot would go violently round the bend at the news of his wife's cheating?

The question is valid and not terribly important to the novel. For the purposes of his argument, Percy harries Lancelot into an extreme position. Taking both his hero's part and that of the silent but attentive priest, the author stages a debate in which the middle ground has been blasted away. "I cannot tolerate this age," Lancelot raves in his cell. "What is more, I won't. That was my discovery: that I didn't have to."

His plan is a patchwork of medieval chivalry, Confederate rhetoric and shoot-'em-up justice. He will go away with the girl in the next room -- a patient in the asylum who has been gang-raped into insensibility. In Lancelot's view, this outrage has purified her of every indulgence he hates in the modern world. Together they will be the new Adam and Eve, dedicated to "a stern code, a gentleness toward women and an intolerance of swinishness."

Lancelot's plan is clearly crazed. Percy's questioning is something else. Simply by asking whether flaccid tolerance is not as brutalizing as rigid in tolerance, he raises the kind of issue that good fiction can most thoroughly show in the round. Despite its occasional reediness of tone and a bitterness that seems more peevish than profound, Lancelot makes an entertaining run at high seriousness. It is easy to read and hard to forget. Paul Gray

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.