Yes.

Very well. I am finished. Is there anything else you wish to tell me before I leave?

Yes.

Percy writes in many places of a corrupt church that is blind and obsolete. But when Lancelot has informed Christianity of the world and its realities, then, Percy believes, it will have something to tell the world.

PERCY IS NOT a stuffy, uninformed Christian. He believes that scientists are capable of exploring the "angel side" of man but that they will not find anything but biochemistry in chimpanzees. To Percy, the overriding evidence of man's spirituality is the habit of language, or the spark that led Helen Keller to conceive a universe of names and linguistic relationships out of the box of her senselessness. His writing style grows out of this attitude of detachment and rediscovery. Percy's sentences are made of very plain, when necessary very Anglo-Saxon English and his writing has the almost unnerving declarative quality of Vonnegut. He sees and writes from the detachment and rediscovery of his own life, his own apocalyptic transformation. Alfred Kazin writes that

"Walker Percy graduated from the College of Physicians at Columbia, and as an intern caught pulmonary tuberculosis from one of the many bodies on which he performed autopsies. America was just entering the war. While waiting to be admitted to the famous Trudeau sanitarium in Saranac Lake, Percy lived in a boarding house, all alone, reading and beginning to write. He says now, 'TB liberated me.'

His illness, the enforced absence from his family, the solitariness all seem to have brought out in him one of those religious personalities William James called 'twice-born'... His novels seem to be essentially the self-determination of a religious personality, of a seeker who after being ejected from the expected and conventional order of things has come to himself as a stranger in the world."

A reader unfamiliar with Walker Percy might dismiss Lancelot as a last middle-aged battle against impotence of a biological rather than an existential kind, complicated and intensified by a Southern upbringing and a Christian conversion. And next to The Moviegoer, whose main Southern Catholic character claims to feel "more Jewish than the Jews I know," and which won the 1962 National Book Award, Percy's declarative style has become self-conscious and strained. His first novel, The Last Gentleman, is his most exploratory, and a personal favorite. But after that, there is the newest song from Mr. Percy's canary.