Rating: 
Summary: You will not beleive Will's adventure
Review: But you are not supposed to. If you are looking for Percy the catholic here you will be let down. If you are looking for Percy the southernman you will be let down. If you are looking for Percy the novelist you will love this book. The story is long and the observations about human behavior are incredible. A eye for people is on display and if you are wait threw the slow start you will see some truly great writing. Never have I read a book and wish I could talk to the author somuch..Truly great stuff..You might even find you know Will or the Vaught's..enjoy and read with wine.
Rating:
Summary: A characterization of the human condition
Review: Deceptively meandering at first, slow to take root in the mind, Percy's 'The Last Gentleman' will reward persistent readers with an egrossing and entertaining characterization of the human condition. Will Barrett is the literary everyman who is never happy when things are pleasant, never satisfied at the feast, never more invigorated than when his contemporaries feel hopeless. And he doesn't have any idea why. A richly sympbolic telescope brings him into an encounter with a lovely young woman, a dying youth, a pornographic and incompetent doctor and a 'mean as hell' nun - all in the same family. While Barrett travels with this crew and ponders the unanswerable questions that continue to plague him, he becomes aware that the sick youth's 'salvation' may be 'up to' him. This is a skillful novel with elusive, eclectic characters surrounding a young protagonist whose only crime is an honest search for the truth, so that his life will take on some real meaning. The scene where Barrett converses with the nun while she feeds viscera to a bird of prey is particularly insightful and stimulating. A meaty, complex, thinking-person's novel.
Rating: 
Summary: A Latter day Camus
Review: First of all, I do not bother to review a work I do not like. I am a writer myself and no one likes to get a bad review. Why should I upset another writer on Amazon? So, unless I am paid or asked to review a book in my professional capacity, I only comment on really good books. The Last Gentleman is such a book. It reminds me of Camus, Herman Hesse, or Franz Kafka at their best. There are enough previous reviews on Amazon to relate the plot outline; I need not repeat this. Those who only gave this book 2 or 3 stars admitted that they "didn't get it" or could not understand what the book is about. Existentialism is not for everyone. Nor is satire of the Percy genre.
But I loved it. Almost as much as Love in the Ruins
Edward C. Green
Harvard University
Rating: 
Summary: A little disappointing
Review: I have long been a fan of Walker Percy's essays and his novel The Moviegoer, a novel that will always resonate with me as someone who grew up in the South. Yet The Last Gentleman, to me, was something of a disappointment. Will Barrett is a thinly drawn character, a product of Percy's fascination with amnesia as a critical path toward waking up to life itself. Walker is fascinated with amnesia and other shocks as a device to draw attention to the complacent familiarity of the everyday, as observed by someone who has just awakened to the ongoing scene, a kind of latter day Rip Van Winkle.But in this novel, this gets a little tedious. Instead of showing us the strangeness of the everyday, Percy has Barrett tell us that it is strange, or employs the device of having the failed physician, Sutter, do the telling in a journal of sorts. One thing really puzzles me about Percy's entire work: his curious inability to render black people interesting or meaningful. He was writing about the South of the late 1950s and the 1960s but his African-American characters are cartoons about a captive people. I think this is a tip-off to one of Percy's blind spots masquerading as a philosophical stance. He wants us to accept that our struggle toward meaning and our existential "lostness" is far more fundamental and urgent than our inhumanity toward our fellow beings. This is a serious distortion of the existentialist position and it's made worse by Percy's refusal to offer complex, interesting and thick characerizations of black people in a South that was exploding. One of the reasons for our lostness is that the very familiarity of the ordinary and everyday spins an amnesiac spell over us all toward the brutal inhumanities and indignities occurring right under our noses. We have all become lost and complicit in our lostness, not just to our true self and its existential predicament but also to our essential humanity.
Rating:
Summary: An ample meal
Review: I just finished this book and wanted to get out a review while my memory was still fresh. I consumed The Last Gentleman in small doses because there was just so much. It's still settling but I think I'll have to re-read it anyhow. Where to begin? The engineer is an ideal narrater because he is such an excellent observer. That's what he does after all, views from afar, with a telescope even in the beginning of the story. He's not sure why he is where he is (did I mention that he's amnesiac) and in getting his bearings is by necesssity very keen in observing people and places. Yet despite the absurdity of his condition his actions remain plausable and despite being a dreamer he is at times the most grounded character in the novel.
What does the engineer observe? A confused, whimsical belle named Kitty who is his love, and the displaced family around her. Her con artist (in a benevolent way) of a father, her mystic, lewd brother Sutter and her mystic, martyr sister Val, her sickly brother Jamie, and finally her caretaker for a sister-in-law. In a odyssey of absurdity the engineer travels from New York City to Carolina and finally to New Mexico, facing irate Pennsylvanians and rioting students, even the police in his native town. He does so with his keen eye and lack of dishonesty, eventually untangling his love Kitty from the "loving" clutches of her sister-in-law and caring for his friend and Kitty's brother Jamie on his deathbed, leaving a wake of bewildered men and women. A great read that takes time to ingest, and who knows how long to digest.
Rating:
Summary: An ample meal
Review: I just finished this book and wanted to get out a review while my memory was still fresh. I consumed The Last Gentleman in small doses because there was just so much. It's still settling but I think I'll have to re-read it anyhow. Where to begin? The engineer is an ideal narrater because he is such an excellent observer. That's what he does after all, views from afar, with a telescope even in the beginning of the story. He's not sure why he is where he is (did I mention that he's amnesiac) and in getting his bearings is by necesssity very keen in observing people and places. Yet despite the absurdity of his condition his actions remain plausable and despite being a dreamer he is at times the most grounded character in the novel.
What does the engineer observe? A confused, whimsical belle named Kitty who is his love, and the displaced family around her. Her con artist (in a benevolent way) of a father, her mystic, lewd brother Sutter and her mystic, martyr sister Val, her sickly brother Jamie, and finally her caretaker for a sister-in-law. In a odyssey of absurdity the engineer travels from New York City to Carolina and finally to New Mexico, facing irate Pennsylvanians and rioting students, even the police in his native town. He does so with his keen eye and lack of dishonesty, eventually untangling his love Kitty from the "loving" clutches of her sister-in-law and caring for his friend and Kitty's brother Jamie on his deathbed, leaving a wake of bewildered men and women. A great read that takes time to ingest, and who knows how long to digest.
Rating:
Summary: Hopefully number 3 will be better
Review: I picked up Percy's second work, The Last Gentleman, after reading his initial book, The Movie Go-er a few years ago while in Massachusetts. In the end, I found it hard to get into the story. I could not identify with the characters. They seemed a little unreal. I could not identify with Will Barrett. I could not comprehend his inner dispositions, or how his personal history formed the person he was. The same thing with Sutter, although his ramblings in his notebook were interesting. Val was in another world for me. No doubt this probably says more about me. I don't know if that says something about how I might view southerners. I hope not. Although there were moments I truly enjoyed, I could not get into the plot. It just seemed a tad far-fetched. I didn't mind hearing the names of dated appliances or food stuffs. I derived pleasure from that, the so-called "blast from the past". I like how Percy drops here and there the strange things we humans do. There is too much that is still unresolved. I think it needs a sequel. Maybe it is just me.
I intend to pick up and read Love in the Ruins, as well as all of Walker Percy's works (non-fiction as well). That is definitely me.
Rating:
Summary: The Meaning of Salvation
Review: I recently read The Moviegoer by Percy, and I would definately rate it as my favorite novel. I was really excited to pick of The Last Gentleman as my second Percy novel, and though I would not rate it as highly as The Moviegoer, it was far from a disappointment. It is certainly a book that I will cherish among my very favorites. The primary character of the novel is Bill Barrett (who is more often called the engineer). The engineer suffers from amnesia and periods of deja vu, and he reads about a near-apocolyptic catostrophe and wonders if it has already happened. He is the lost (dead) American. One day, looking through his telescope, he sees a girl, and the result is that he becomes involved with her family the Vaughts. The relationship with them ends up sending him on a journey through the South and on to New Mexico, a journey in which he gains a type of salvation. One of Percy's primary beliefs about novel writing was that it should be entertaining, and The Last Gentleman succeeds. It is at times hilarious and is often moving. It is true that there are periods where it drags a little, but the truths Percy presents more than make up for those sections. The Last Gentleman is a supremely beautiful, entertaining, and thoughtful novel.
Rating:
Summary: The Last Gentleman: What it means to pass from death to life
Review: Marooned in New York City, displaced Southerner Will Barrett finds himself utterly abstracted
from his world and himself. When a chance encounter in Central Park leads him to make the
acquaintance of the Vaughts, fellow Southerners who knew his father, Will embarks on a journey
that he hopes will tell him what he desperately needs to know. What does he need to know?
If Will knew the answer to that, he wouldn't need the Vaughts, or the South, or the haunted
memory of his father. Traversing the country, Will seeks the one man he believes will tell
him what to do. Percy not only weaves a lush character study of lost Will, but realizes a profound meditation on the nature of identity, place, and home. Above all, like any
good picaresque novel, Will's journey is not so much about the end, but about what he discovers along the way. However, as a testament to
Percy's imagination and probity, Will's final destination provides nothing less than utter
revelation. I closed this book and jumped out of bed immediately, my breath coming in gulps
as I absorbed and processed what Walker Percy had taught me with such love, patience, beauty
and truth.
Rating:
Summary: The Last Gentleman: What it means to pass from death to life
Review: Marooned in New York City, displaced Southerner Will Barrett finds himself utterly abstractedfrom his world and himself. When a chance encounter in Central Park leads him to make theacquaintance of the Vaughts, fellow Southerners who knew his father, Will embarks on a journey that he hopes will tell him what he desperately needs to know. What does he need to know? If Will knew the answer to that, he wouldn't need the Vaughts, or the South, or the haunted memory of his father. Traversing the country, Will seeks the one man he believes will tell him what to do. Percy not only weaves a lush character study of lost Will, but realizes a profound meditation on the nature of identity, place, and home. Above all, like any good picaresque novel, Will's journey is not so much about the end, but about what he discovers along the way. However, as a testament to Percy's imagination and probity, Will's final destination provides nothing less than utter revelation. I closed this book and jumped out of bed immediately, my breath coming in gulps as I absorbed and processed what Walker Percy had taught me with such love, patience, beauty and truth.
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