Rating: 
Summary: Is Utilitarianism good?
Review: Dr. Tom More, a psychiatrist named after St. Thomas More, is a non-practicing Catholic who has just been released from two years in prison, having been convicted of prescribing drugs wholesale to mental institutions. His partners, Dr. Bob Comeaux and Dr. Max Gottlieb, welcome him back, taking responsibility for his parole.
In his hospital rounds, Tom notices unusual sexual behavior among patients. His friend, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, a public-health official, finds a correlation between the behavior and the unusual heavy-sodium (Na24) concentrations in their blood. Her computer searches reveal that the entire town has been drinking water with high Na24 concentrations. Tom, Lucy and her uncle trace the source of the Na24 to a line from an old sodium-cooled nuclear plant.Dr. Comeaux and Dr. Van Dorn, another psychiatrist, are conducting the unauthorized, clandestine Na24 experiment on the community. The results show that the Na24 has almost eliminated crime and sexual deviancy while greatly increasing intellectual and athletic performance throughout the community. One side effect is the more gorilla-like behavior of the people, exhibited primarily in their sexual behavior and observed by Dr. More. How Tom and Lucy discover and expose the Na24 experiment is a good mystery story. Although Tom and Lucy never articulate the moral difficulties of the experiment, the difficulties are revealed through the character of Fr. Smith, a Catholic priest whose bizarre behavior marks him as insane. The plot reveals the fallacy of Utilitarianism, pitting Tom and Lucy against a small group of influential and highly respected people whose experiment has done much to improve the quality of life in the community. The theme is similar to that in Brave New World, wherein Utilitarianism is to be judged false by the instinctive moral values of the reader. The author never criticizes Utilitarianism nor does he propose a substitute for it. He implies that the bad side effect, rather than Utilitarianism's inherent depersonalization of human beings, justifies its condemnation. He does imply Utilitarianism also justifies abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia (good thanatos), but does not explain why these should be considered evil. He also warns that the U.S. Supreme Court judges by Utilitarianism. The fate of each of the characters, described near the end of the book (Pp 340 ff), is a realistic and entertaining commentary on society today. The Utilitarians remain unrepentant but escape prison sentences; however, they are given jobs that use their good characteristics while preventing the use of their bad. A sex episode (Part 3, Pp 158-166) seems unnecessary, except perhaps to help show that everyone in the book is guilty of mortal sin except Virgil, a homespun Black. Later examples of pornography are so generally described that envisioning them is not a problem. The author is noted as a great Catholic philosophical novelist, but there is little that is Catholic in the book.
Rating:
Summary: Smart book, slow plot
Review: edville, Louisiana s going through some major changes, changes that will effect their lives. Bob Comeaux, Van Dorn, and Max Gottlieb are heading up a top-secret operation, in the hope of bettering the community. Walker Percy writes The Thanatos Syndrome with the intentions of having the reader contemplate the little contamination of every day life. The aforementioned men head a study that puts heavy doses of sodium in the town's water supply. This causes the drinkers of the water to be set back to a nearly primal stage, but that's not the case. Dr. Tom Moore notices bizarre behavior patterns in his patients, friends, and even his wife. Moore had been is prison for selling drugs to truck drivers to help them stay awake, and had not witnessed the change in people. He finds out that someone has been contaminating the citizens of Fedville with extraordinary amounts of sodium. Moore finds himself in a whir pool of problems, from the strange activity in the town, to a strange ring of child-molesters in the school that his children attend. In the end the Thanatos Syndrome, probes every thing from Euthanasia, to improving society. Ultimately, this book asks, "Can you improve a society from the outside?" Walker Percy's book is witty and insightful, yet slow in some places, the reader should also be aware that it is very graphic. The book probes American culture very well and confronts the reader with the controversial topic, death towards the betterment of society.
Rating: 
Summary: Still buzzing
Review: Have you read anything recently that just kinda buzzed around in your head for a while afterwards as you tried to get a grip on it. I'm still trying to sort through the parallels I'm seeing in this book to other great pieces of literature. Perhaps I'll start with G.K. Chesterton who said (I'm paraphrasing here) the world is being destroyed, not by our vices, but by our virtues run amok. The moral heroes in _The Thanatos Syndrome_ are fairly suspect morally. The main character was just released from prison for traficking in narcotics. The villains are brilliant men who want to reduce crime, unwanted pregnancies, medical expenses, violence, and to improve learning, memory and good citizenship. All this by adding a touch of chemicals to the water supply, just like flouride. Other parallels which come to mind are Dostoevsky's novels, or perhaps Robert Penn Warren's _All the King's Men_, where an interlude from a completely different time sheds light on the current action. In this case the interlude is told by an old and senile priest who remembers his youth in Germany in the 30's. He recalls how he felt that his friends were better people than he, and only by accident did he return to the US. The pace of this book does occasionally seem a bit slow, but it was well worth the time put in.
Rating: 
Summary: Are we once again headed for Auschwitz?
Review: I can give no higher recommendation for this book than to say
that I named my son Walker, after reading this and Percy's other, earlier works. Mr. Percy has written a highly moralistic satire of what Pope John Paul II has called our "culture of death" in a mystery's clothing. The plotline is taut and intriguing as we follow Dr. Tom More (the same alcoholic, bad Catholic, freudian psychiatrist who was the hero of Percy's "Love in the Ruins")as he tries to determine what exactly has made the people in Feliciana Parish,LA lose their neuroses and take on other subtly primate-like behaviours.
Percy shows us the dangers and roots of social engineering
as shown by the Weimar Republic and shows how slippery the slope on which abortion and euthanasia lie.
However, all is accomplished with grand wit and flawless writing, as Percy yet again accomplishes what most believe
to be an impossibility...he constructs an entertaining AND
enlightening novel that teaches without preaching and ex-
pands us while giving us much to laugh about.
Rating:
Summary: Ignore (this book, not the review) at your own peril
Review: Ignore The Thanatos Syndrome at your own peril. The last novel of the late Walker Percy, this often harrowing, sometimes humorous (darkly, at least) tale should set off alarms bells as you read through this thriller. The notion of Walker Percy penning a thriller is, of itself, something odd, and a point that apparently raises the ire of many academics and even many dyed-in-the-wool Percy readers. And this book is different from say, The Moviegoer, in which the inward musings and vexations of the protagonist are fairly insulated from the outside world and its views, opinions, influences. Moreover, Dr. More does not act as the prototypical loner characteristic of some of Percy's other protagonists. Percy's decision to write this novel as more of a fast-paced thriller, the central story occurs over just three days, must have been his attempt to shoot a flare that would draw attention to the dehumanization that started coalescing with more fervor some 15 years ago. (Now civility may be a lost cause: people consider it proper to conduct public arguments with unseen opponents by blathering all manner of nonsense into their cell phones.) And so the flawed hero, the same disheveled, womanizing, fallen Catholic psychiatrist Thomas More practically stumbles upon a scheme to control human behavior by adding radioisotopes to the water supply. After all, the perpetuators of the scheme remind him, look what fluoride has done for oral health. What if we can eliminate depression, crime, disease, and enhance learning, cognition, and memory at the same time? Relying of his beloved bourbon to keep him grounded, Dr. More, fresh out of prison for supplying truckers with uppers, finds his wife and children swept up in the scheme. He plays some hunches, and together with his cousin Lucy, a skilled epidemiologist who employs what was the Internet before any of us every thought about it, discovers a scheme that is both more far-reaching and nefarious than anything since the heyday of Nazi Germany. Dr. More also allies with Vergil Bon, Jr., whose moral center and keen intellect prove pivotal in discovering the physical means of dosing the population and in confronting the horrors of pedophilia lurking under the surface. Both Lucy's and Bon's clearcut, strong character fly in the face of those critics who harangue Percy for creating weak or unfocused female or black characters. Dr. More is the moral and intellectual center of the story, and, typical of many of Percy's leading characters, he struggles to reinvent himself, to get things right, to make the correct decisions. He is not awed by authority, swayed by power, or tempted by riches. Instead, he considers himself to be ''an old-fashioned physician of the soul.'' The parallels between this modern plot to make life better and to terminate anyone whose quality of life doesn't meet the "norm" are clearly drawn by Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, an alcoholic Catholic priest who has retreated to a fire tower where he scans the countryside for smoke and regards himself as a modern version of St. Simeon Stylites. Percy uses this character as a mouthpiece for much of his own philosophy, using a long confession from Father Smith to lay out his thesis about how evil festers and manifests under the guise of perceived goodness. The first half of the novel carefully unfolds the plot, as Dr. More first suspects things are amiss, then begins connecting the dots, all the while being watched and wooed by the project's architects, who try to recruit Dr. More by challenging him to show what's inherently wrong with a macro-solution to society's woes. The second half of the book moves rapidly, surging ahead like the nail-biting pirogue trip downriver to rescue the children. The action continues as Dr. More shoots down (figuratively) the various arguments presented by Dr. Comeaux or Van Dorn.
Ultimately, Walker Percy has forged here a strikingly unconventional means for debating the philosophical ramifications of meddling with free will, the individual's right to make good or bad choices, to live in happiness or in depression, to succeed or fail on one's own merits. We need to fight for our own happiness and our own rights, he might argue, to enable us to keep at bay the darker tendencies of human nature.
Walker Percy's prose is, as always, fine, rich, precise. Percy rarely embellishes beyond what is needed, yet he can render a dead-on depiction of how people really talk, think, even move. His minor characters are not jolting or decorative, though many are eccentric, and his love of the Louisiana landscape permeates the outdoor settings. One reading will not suffice to coax the ideas and observations from The Thanatos Syndrome. Perhaps here, though, are some of the questions we need to ask in a time when genetic customization, "me-first" socialization, and symbolism dominate the cultural landscape; when mercy killing is legal in two European countries (so far); and terrorists and fundamentalists vie for control of our free will and civil liberties.
Rating:
Summary: Dense, slow and brilliant
Review: Slow-going at first, Percy bombards the readers with moral dilemmas with every turn of the page. Doctors are often brilliant and just as often morally flawed. Remember, Joseph Mengele was a doctor and so are those who abort a million HUMANS each year in 1990s America. Percy knew that America and the West had entered another holocaust with our embrace of abortion. Beware the doctor who can save the world with his medical tinkering-no human has that ability and mankind is not perfectable. In 1980s America, man is still flawed and in many cases uncivilized and evil. There is no pill for that.
Rating: 
Summary: Not one of Percy's best novels
Review: The novel takes place in south Louisiana and explores interesting philosophical questions such as free will, homosexuality, pedophilia and euthanasia. Villians contaminate the water supply in a grand, secret experiment to reduce crime and neuroses, thereby turning a parish into a large study group. The protagonist is a morally questionable character trying to solve the mystery of his patients bizarre primitive behaviors. The characters and basic storyline make the book intriguing. There's a trace of thriller and mystery in the plot, but the story often falls short in the prose, which I found to be a bit slow and redundant at times. Percy's characters repeat each others statements too many times; it makes the story read a bit like a screenplay. There are also some pretty disturbing, yet thought provoking graphic scenes that are effective in getting the reader to think about societal atrocities. They are not for the faint of heart. The ending was rather anti-climatic and droned on too long after the main climax, making the story seem to just tucker out. It's not the type of book that I would read over and over.
Rating:
Summary: Does the end justify the means?
Review: The novel The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy is a captivating story about the incredible powers of the human mind, and the destruction that is possible when one manipulates this precious system. Dr. More, fresh from incarceration for illegal drug distribution, challenges a group of his medical collegues who have created a project to alter the mental capabilities of the citizens of the town of Feliciana by adding sodium to the town's drinking water supply. This altering of the mind creates a deep moral conflict. The citizens are unaware of the experiment being perfomed on them, and therefore their rights are being violated. The sodium also causes both positive and negative effects in society, so the ethical benefits must be weighed agains the negative side effects. The twisted finale to the book leaves the reader questioning his or her own beliefs and moral views.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the best novel I have ever read
Review: The Thanatos Syndrome relies upon a flimsy detective story to examine the greatest issues facing Americans (perhaps all of Western culture) as we enter the 21st century. Not that the genre device fails, but that it seems so inconsequential next to the ideas which hang upon it, like the rod that supports the wardrobe of existence, itself. Although this novel was written in the late 20th century, it feels as if it could be today or tomorrow. We are introduced to themes that are totally familiar, yet somehow bizarre: sex detached from love (and/or procreation), emphasis on results at play/work/and school, social engineering, amorality, mercy-killing, faith in the rightness of science/technology/and progress, abandonment of of our humanity. All this, and yet readable, engaging, absorbing and memorable. If you are interested in an entertainment that makes you think and ponder the great issues of existence, while keeping you turning the pages, I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the best novel I have ever read
Review: The Thanatos Syndrome relies upon a flimsy detective story to examine the greatest issues facing Americans (perhaps all of Western culture) as we enter the 21st century. Not that the genre device fails, but that it seems so inconsequential next to the ideas which hang upon it, like the rod that supports the wardrobe of existence, itself. Although this novel was written in the late 20th century, it feels as if it could be today or tomorrow. We are introduced to themes that are totally familiar, yet somehow bizarre: sex detached from love (and/or procreation), emphasis on results at play/work/and school, social engineering, amorality, mercy-killing, faith in the rightness of science/technology/and progress, abandonment of of our humanity. All this, and yet readable, engaging, absorbing and memorable. If you are interested in an entertainment that makes you think and ponder the great issues of existence, while keeping you turning the pages, I highly recommend this book.
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