"If I were, I wouldn't be here."

"Then why is it I seem to have known you before I knew you. We are different but also the same."

"I know. I don't know."

"Then why does it seem I am not only I but also you?"

"I don't know."

In the novel of ideas, conversations like this inevitably bode romance. sure enough, Barrett and Allison fall in love, and Percy presents this newfound love as the sign from God Barrett was waiting for.

YOU CAN'T really begrudge Percy or his hero this romance, even though it helps betray the existentialism at the heart of Percy's fiction--the whole point of Christian existentialism was the need to believe without an external sign. the conclusion Percy provides his novel with, however, is more than a philosophical cop-out. It rips out his inspirational taproot: his refusal to explain away or excuse the psychological dilemmas of his characters. It turns out, you see, that Barrett's delusions--blown up by the author into chapters' worth of prose--are caused by an imbalance in the pH of his bloodstream, easily correctable by the addition of hydrogen ions. Percy's reduction of the alienated condition of man to a manageable chemical problem mocks not only all his own best writing but also some very intelligent philosophy which he has previously raided for the substance of his own work. Perhaps the self-appointed Kierkegaard of the mint julep golf circuit would blame his intellectual forebear's disaffection on anemia.

Percy became a cult hero by writing about the emptiness at the bottom of American prosperity. That doesn't mean he can't write a happy ending if he wants to. But The Second Coming's conclusion, with Will and Allison starting their lives over together, simply ignores all of Percy's oft-repeated questions. Barrett will have his work, his wife, and God too in the bargain. All dilemmas are resolved, with no explanations.

There is no second coming in this novel. There isn't even a premonition--only the sad spectacle of a writer at the end of his ingenuity, forced to undermine the foundations of his best work out of desperation or delusion. His characters don't make a new start at all, just a very, very old ending.