The Second Coming: A Novel / by Walker Percy

A native of the American South, Walker Percy (1916-1990) was born into a family of distinguished lineage and one which held particularly tragic heritage. When he was thirteen his own father committed suicide and then, two years later, his mother was killed when she drove off a bridge (an act Percy also considered a suicide). Throughout his life, Percy would feel the impact and impression these events had on his youthful conscious and subsquent life, struggling for years to come to terms with his family's tragic legacy. His second-to-last novel, The Second Coming, is a book--among his most autobiographical works--which explores the themes of clinical depression, existensialism, semiotics and faith in a cleverly entertaining way.
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"The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people's lives were, they generally gave no sign it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself?" p. 4
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Fed up with what he feels is an utterly useless existence, wealthy bachelor Will Barrett decides on a course of action which, conceivably, will bring about his end on earth. Rather than shoot himself, he moves from his comfortable existence in his opulent house situated on the green of a golf course to a cave, where, without food and only a little water, he plans to extinguish his life through natural deprivation. Figuring that, if there is a God, his life and faith will be somehow restored, Will follows through on his plan, living out his literal 'dark night of the soul', gradually, as the hours then days, then weeks pass by, growing weaker, fainter and less in touch with reality. At long last when he's brought to the point of no return and as hallucinations begin overtaking his sanity, he inadvertently tumbles out of the cave, down the hill and into the backyard of a neighbor where a peculiar, memory-challenged young woman named Allison, herself having just escaped from a mental institution, sits watering the plants in a greenhouse.

Percy's 1980 novel was actually a sequel to his earlier book The Last Gentleman, which concerned Will Barrett at an earlier point in his life. And while this volume presents many of the same characteristics and quirky running narrative about its protagonist which were prominently featured in the first book, The Second Coming sits at a higher intellectual plane. Much more of the author's own existential and spiritual consternations highlight the story as Will's inner turmoil, his philosophical assessments of his life--deeply rooted in suicides of both his father and grandfather--and that of the world around him resonate from page one till the final dialogue between Will and Allison. The world of internal emptiness which depression evokes is uniquely manifested through Percy's prose.
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