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Summary: Walker Percy retells Dostoevsky
Review: Walker Percy said that "The Last Gentleman" is a retelling of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot". Having just read both books I can say that is prime façie obvious.In both novels the main character falls happenstance into the lives of complete strangers and becomes almost a part of their family. In "The Idiot" Prince Myshkin claims relations to this family via a distance relative. In "The Last Gentleman" the Vaughn family knows Williston Bibb Barrett through Bibb's father who was an important attorney in the South and who knew many people. The character of both novels is beset by a nervous disorder. For Mr. Barrett--called "the engineer" because he worked in the boiler room of Macy's department store-it is a something called "déjà vu". That means he suffered from lapses in memory, a feeling of déjà vu, depression, and maybe a form of panick attack. Percy writes "Things seemed to turn white and dense and time became freighted with an unspeakable emotion". (I think that Walker Percy might also be borrowing from Thomas Mann. Dostoevsky's Price Myskin returns from a sanatorium at the onset of the novel. In Mann's "The Magic Mountain" the setting is a sanatorium and the character Hans Castorp is an engineer as is Mr. Barrett if only in name.) Both Dostoevsky's Prince Myskin and the Percy's engineer cannot resist blurting out their afflication to whomever they meet. The engineer "cannot tell a lie". Both approach their audience with wide-eyed naïveté. I would have thought that some listeners would have been annoyed, but most lend a sympatheti ear. You find yourself squirming in your seat wishing this pathetic character would not reveal so much of himself. The last glaring similarity between the characters and the plots: the engineer and Price Myskin are able to support themselves with wads of cash handed to them by circumstance. The engineer keeps coming into money just as he is about to run out. I found that a little annoying and too convenient to carry the plot forward. But I brushed aside my annoyance and continued to read. The engineer is from an aristocratic family in Mississippi. He is sent up to Princeton but then drops out later during an attack of déjà vu. He wants to escape to New York City and live a low-stress life. "He envied the janitors" says the narrator. But the Vaughn's find him living in the YMCA and working in a menial job and so take him under their wing. Walker Percy has been called a Southern writer by many critics. They don't mean he is a writer who lived and worked in the South. He did that. Rather they mean his language is whimsical, full of magnolia-and-moonlight imagery, and peppered with references to the Civil War. (That old war is still important because it still affects the Southern thinking.) This novel, set in New York City, Mississippi, and New Mexico, winds through the Old South in a sort of a literary travelogue of Southern heritage and language.
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