Love in the Ruins

Love in the Ruins #1

by Walker Percy

Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Classics, Novels, Science Fiction, Catholic, Southern

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Walker Percy was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Trained as a physician at Columbia University, Percy decided to become a writer after a bout of tuberculosis. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.”
― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins



Every time I read Walker Percy I fall in love. I seduce myself into thinking I'm actually just a bad Catholic and promise myself that next time I get a chance I will lose myself in the desert, the woods, or anywhere I can see the cold stars and the burning sand and live forever somewhere in between.

Reading another Percy novel is like discovering an unopened can of cashews in the cupboard. The amount of joy and delight I get from reading and laughing at Percy's absurd view of religion, life, love, the modern era, etc., is really only approached by a handful of lightly salted cashews and sex. 'Love in the Ruins' is messy and weird and probably could have been edited a bit, but it ALL still works perfectly for me. I laughed through every paragraph and each mark of punctuation. Percy's bad, crazy genius, almost polygamist, Catholic protagonists speak to me in ways that most philosophers (old and new), preachers (godly and godless), and politicians (left or right) fail to. He seems to occupy the ground of the fellow traveler who is just as lost and mistaken as you, but possesses a bit more whit and some extra whiskey.

So where does this novel stack up? It was like a friendly dystopian novel. It was like McCarthy decided to write a comic novel. The vines of his morality slide and creep through every page and his humor dances like a purple martin at dusk. The book might only be objectively a four star novel, but this is my review dammit and I own and carry my biases and I love Walker Percy because he makes me want to both believe AND misbehave.

[Charles · Rating 1 out of 5]

Capsule Review: Don't Read Walker Percy. Ever.

Longer Review: If somebody recommends this book (or any other of his books) to you, rest assured that that he will one day soon try to convince you that the Eagles really are rock n' roll. Afterwards, he will probably inflict some of his "poetry" on you. You know the kind of stuff I mean: four-line stanzas in ABAB that will inevitably rhyme the words "pain" with "insane," "soul" with "hole," "heart" with "apart," and "feel" with "unreal." Luckily, though, you will see this coming, and as soon as your friend/lover/spouse/relative/coworker/mutual or new acquaintance/etc. recommends this author to you, you can immediately make the decision forever to exclude him (or her) from your literary life. That's right: whenever he mentions some book he read, change the subject. Talk about the weather; fake a seizure, if necessary. For example, say your boss, Mr. When-I'm-in-My-Car-I-Rock-Out-to-The Best of Sting, has previously recommended to you a novel written by one Walker Percy (thus alerting you that all of his taste is in his mouth). Your boss then approaches you one morning and says, "Hey, Suzy, how are you? You know, I was rereading Anne Rice this weekend, and I thought of you, because, you know, you can read, and I thought you might enjoy it." At this point, casually announce that the sun has given you cancer and you no longer have time to read before you die. Watch him shut up.

(And yes, I've posted the exact same review for all the Walker Percy books I've been unfortunate enough to read. Percy's works aren't worth more than one original review. Besides, if you've read one of his books, you've read them all.)

[Christopher Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite novel. The protagonist, Dr. Tom More, explores the possibility of simultaneously loving three women for different reasons while living in a world that is falling apart. Perhaps Percy's "Ruins" is a metaphor for the decline of our society and for Dr. More's mental illness. It isn't always clear to how much of More's paranoia is imagined, and how much is a product of his alcohol and allergy-induced visions. Percy's description of the decay of Southern Coastal society into armed camps divided along racial, idealogical, and political lines is a delicious satire that still seems apropos in 2013, forty years after Love in the Ruins' first publication. Somehow, despite the expanding decay, both in general society around him, and in his person, Dr. More manages to show me reason to be hopeful about our future, especially about the endurance of love.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Walker Percy at his misanthropic, self-hating Catholic best. The story centers around Thomas More, a self-professed "bad Catholic" who loves women and whiskey a lot more than God or his fellow man. (He basically could care less for his fellow man, and he'd probably choose his beloved Early Times over women as well). What makes him appealing is his grasp of the human condition that he is faced with, where people are continually estranged from themselves and their own swirling desires. So, he invents a device designed to reconcile opposites within the human psyche.Of course, he is no different as he is in love with three women at once. This is set against a backdrop of political unrest and revolution. It's definitely a satire but it has plenty of serious parts and elements as well. I liked it. Awesome.

[Melody · Rating 2 out of 5]

I slogged through this only making it because of an occasional witty descriptive phrase. The story is about the collapse of a fragmented society. Dr. Tom More has invented a device (a lapsometer) which he believes can cure people from their demons. He has his own demons too.
Some will find his writing and the plot clever and brilliantly written. I found both very tedious.

[Lance Kinzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I sometimes can't decide if Love in The Ruins is my favorite or least favorite Percy novel. I enjoyed it a great deal upon a recent re-read. Perhaps it is because I'm now much closer in age to the protagonist and so better able to relate to his perspective. The absurdist nature of the story can be a bit confounding - and at times perhaps even a bit self indulgent. But, that very context allows Percy to explore from yet another angle the core theme of all his novels; the difficulty of finding one's place in a disjointed and morally confused modern world. And for my money the very last paragraph is a wonderful clue, among others scattered though out, pointing to a possible answer.

[Jason Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe the strangest book I've ever read.

this book is a perverse, pious, and odd angled look at the downfall of the American mind and American society. having just finished it, my head is spun with thoughts of the dislocated and disassociated nature of the prose and themes. I don't know if I should recommend it or bury it in the backyard for fear the children might stumble onto it. you'll have to decide for yourself.

[Steven R. McEvoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a hard time reading this book. I put it down a number of times and it took me a month to make it through. Full review below.
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First, I need to state this book was not an easy read. I normally rip through novels in a day or two. And this one took me almost a month, and there were several pauses. In fact, there were a few times when I put it down, I did not really expect to pick it up again. But so many people have recommended that I read Percy Walker that I really wanted to try and finish the book. I picked this and another Walker book up when they were on sale. And if I had paid full price, I likely would have returned the eBook for refund. Usually when I am reading a novel, I do not want to put it down, this one I had no problem leaving for days, even weeks. It was sort of a Lenten penance to actually finish it. But being a sucker for punishment I know I will at least try the other one I picked up, The Second Coming.

I was baffled by this book. I have friends who have given it 5 stars and others who have given it 1. I ended up in the middle giving it a 3. But up until the last few chapters I can easily understand those who rate it at 1 or 2 stars. The description of the new Open Road Media eBook edition is:

“Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.”

When I finally finished this novel, I could not help but compare it to A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright. For in that novel I know people who interpret it completely differently. Some conclude the whole book is a result of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), and others a time travel novel. Part of we wonders if this whole book is the thoughts of a patient on the ward. And the doctor never got out of the hospital.

When I was in university, I knew a man who was an atheist existentialist, he took that to his logical conclusion, “If nothing I do here matters, and there is no here after, why continue being here.” And he attempted suicide. This novel is a mix of existentialism, satire and political commentary. Reading it from our time and place it just baffles me. And I really did not enjoy it. For the fans of Walker out there, I will give another a try. And hope for the best.

Read the review on my blog Book Reviews and More.

Note: This book is part of a series of reviews: 2020 Catholic Reading Plan!

[Bethany Zakrzewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this is like listening to that distant relative at family reunions who is very intelligent, drunkenly derailing about something, politically charged, kind of sexist, racist, and sometimes you don't know if he should be evaluated for schizophrenia.

This is a weird book in that, at times, it is horribly dated and at others, it is timeless . For example, this book is clearly satirizing racism, sexism, religious differences, political party stereotypes. But for me, reading it from the perspective of a Caucasian Louisiana male in the 70s is kind of cringey. But that's the point . Which actually makes it kind of genius??

Also this was a very ironic book to pick up and read right after the riot on Capitol Hill the other day. Originally published in 1971, it could have been written about 2020. Today it is still a mirror to society showing us that political agendas and rivalries are timeless and cyclic.

[booklady]

Robert Moynihan, reporting from Rome, "Inside the Vatican Magazine" Newsflash, Letter from Rome, #22: 'I studied the works of Walker Percy, the American Catholic novelist, when I was in college, at Harvard. I went to meet Percy in 1977. His most important book is a collection of philosophical essays entitled The Message in the Bottle.

The entire goal of his writing was to show how the historical events of Christian history constituted a "message" which brought life to people who were in the position of "castaways" on a desert island, waiting for a message that could help them in their plight to wash up on the beach...

And he did not write didactically, as if to say, "this is the message, here is part one, here is part two, you must believe this point, and this point, and also this other point..."

Rather, he described men and women finding the message, right in the middle of their loneliness -- all of us are shipwrecked; that is why we should be kind to one another -- and in finding the message, finding true life.'

[Mary Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

Upon finishing this book for the first time, I was confused, somewhat shocked, and left with many questions, the first of which was, “What the heck is up with all the vines everywhere?” it was obvious to me that there was more to this book than I understood. After all, it wasn’t by chance that the author named his protagonist Tom More and made him a descendant of St. Thomas More.

With a few more years of reading and a few years of The Literary Life podcast under my belt, my second reading was much more rewarding. Walker Percy is working out in novel form the issues that C.S Lewis raised in The Abolition of Man. The protagonist, Dr. Tom More sees that all of the troubles in his patients and himself come because they are all “men without Chests”. He invents a tool that can measure the activity of different areas of the brain - particularly areas of low or high activity that lead to angelism, in which one sees the world in abstractions and feels separated from their body, and bestialism, in which one is ruled by physical needs. More knows there is a way to cure this problem if he can only think of how to do it. He seems himself as a new Christ who will solve humanity’s ills for once and all.

I highlighted many more passages in this reading. Once you are looking there are many Biblical allusions, references to Utopia (written by the original Thomas More), Paradise Lost, and Faust. There are also quite a few mirrors, for those of you who know what that means. And I’m sure that there are still depths to this novel that I have not plumbed and I look forward to rereading it and going on to the sequel.

The story ends with More having found the cure that he needed, though it was not the cure he thought he needed. He has once again received the Sacraments - confessed his sins, eaten Christ, and drunk His blood. He goes home to prepare the Christmas feast and to sleep with his wife in the new bed that he bought her - an ending full of symbols and images that I know many of my Goodreads friends will appreciate as an appropriately rich ending to this tale.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just love it when books and other times do sometimes intersect even in small but still noticeable ways. This one is under the radar good, funny and sad, but mostly funny, oh and often insightful/satirical, just the human dilemma played out through many 'oh this again.'

[Graham P · Rating 2 out of 5]

With as much complexity about life, love, race and politics as an episode of Three's Company, 'Love in Ruins' may be termed a 400-page sitcom instead of a 400-page novel. Walker Percy has a dagger in his teeth here, and he writes with abandon, but bland abandon, abandon peppered with bullshit, a whole tanker truck full of abandon that mocks racism and sexism but then wholeheartedly embraces both.

Absurd, perhaps. Inane, most definitely. If anybody wants to prosecute 'the novel about the middle-aged-white-man trying to navigate the crazily changing world', then this should get life in prison. Makes Updike even reach for his pepto bismol.

While there is a mere glimmer of existential glamor here and there: "...already the monks are beginning to collect books again..." this is juvenile, a bad trip into that era where middle-aged writers commented on the sexual and political revolutions - and ended up writing a novel as if they were young boys perusing their first porn rag.

In the novel, our great white hope, Dr. Tom More, has three young women to choose from. He has a life-changing lapsometer, a divine rod that will heal the mind of all its impurities, and he's such a stalwart of racial equality too, trying to treat the black population of this Louisiana suburb with a modicum of respect - and yes, they are called 'Bantus'.

I rarely use the term 'toxic masculinity', but this is on fire with TM. A novel akin to a married man who has multiple affairs, and then blames the women for his own infidelities.

Read it if you want to throw a book across the room.

[Marti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike The Moviegoer which I liked a lot better, this is set in a future dystopia in which everything in the United States has collapsed. The plot revolves around nonsensical gadgets and revolutionaries who live in the swamp. It's also a little dated in that the reader would have to know a lot about radical protests of the early 1970s to get the jokes.

That's not to say that there were not some funny things in here that resonate in our current political and race-obsessed climate. However, it reminded me a lot of White Noise by Don DeLillo.

[Kirby Gepson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super Catholic themes if you look for them. I was intrigued the whole time. I’m not a big sci-Fi/dystopian reader so this was a challenge. I appreciate it and the themes!

My favorite line:
“Don’t commit the one sin for which there is no forgiveness…the sin against grace. If God gives you the grace to believe in Him and love Him and you refuse, the sin will not be forgiven.”

[Elias Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Catholic Infinite Jest. Profound and incredibly funny. Walker Percy meditates on living a genuine faith in a dystopian/painfully-realistic postmodern America characterized by crumbling extravagance, Christian Nationalism, and the Cartesian division between mind and body.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a weird one.

It's satire, surreal, sci fi, I would even call it screwball, but then at times the events and setting don't seem so ungrounded anymore. It just takes place in Louisiana not very far into the future from the novel's publication date of 1970.

A doctor named Thomas More works on a new 'lapsometer' that can read and influence the emotional state of the mind to some extent. Perhaps it can improve the state of the country, perhaps it will win him the Nobel prize, or perhaps it will fall into the wrong hands. He also happens to be Catholic, a very lousy Catholic, a womanizer but never bad enough that he completely leaves the Church. He keeps his faith with him, and occasionally notices it's value.

I honestly have to say the political satire was my favorite part of this. You can tell Percy was writing in the aftermath of the 60s. The U.S. is now literally falling apart through secession movements, but also continues to be polarized politically. There's a new Vietnam war in Ecuador. The swamps are populated by black nationalists and bohemians. When Dr. More is chased by a mysterious sniper I get the impression that this type of situation isn't considered that much out of the ordinary.

Conservatives who believe in faith and country are still around. So are the people that protested Vietnam and voted for George McGovern, continuing to support "Liberty equality...the pill, atheism, pot, antipollution, sex, abortion, and euthanasia." the latter of which is now legal. I enjoyed the abortion jab aimed at William O. Douglas.

The Church is in ruins as well. An American Catholic Church (ACC) broke off, to use a picket fenced home as its logo, promote property rights and raise the American flag when the host is being consecrated. There's a lapsed priest working at the psychological clinic, where scientists run 'love' studies as an excuse to watch people have sex. Sometimes I think certain things are criticized not directly but just as being deliberately portrayed as absurd.

As the story carries on, it looks like something big is going to happen on July 4th, the president is going to be in town. It's not said exactly what for. Perhaps an important conference? Will guerillas attack him? In the end he arrives in town to participate in the community's nationally renowned golf scene, and the sand traps catch on fire, somehow apparently causing an environmental catastrophe, and I think this had something to do with a mysterious yellow cloud mentioned earlier?

Percy is very Catholic, obviously well educated in the matter, and also traditional. There's even a lament for the loss of the Latin Mass. I don't know that the plot went very far. Actually I'm not sure where it went at all, but there were important points made here and there, and I agreed with them. Out of all the Catholic novels I've read this has been the most unique one.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. Brilliant satire set in an alternate universe. Published in 1971, readers found it prescient by 1980. Now, half a century later, it may just be downright prophetic. With a nod to Utopia, the classic satire by St. Thomas More, protagonist Dr. Tom More lives in Paradise, Louisiana, at a moment in U.S. history when race relations are exploding into violence, politics are polarized, and materialistic suburbanites are spreading a spiritual plague. Plus, American Catholics have broken away from Rome and formed an their own Catholic Church with a pope in the mid-west. When Tom invents a device that can cure America's ills, the adventures and chaos begin. It is a scathing assessment of culture in decline, told in way both hilarious and thought-provoking. Loved it and will have to read it again -- SOON!

[Beck Henreckson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I did not expect to! but I did. it's giving White Noise vibes. It felt utterly masterful and perfect. a strange dystopian troubled world — that yet feels so relevant to our present world, half a century later. (troubled Catholics struggling with a faith they cannot escape is my favorite genre lol)

[Parker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This books reads like some dumpster baby of Kierkegaard and Clancy (Yes, Tom Clancy).
The existential inquiries into man in the face of a culture whose pace or direction cares little for its constituents is, as in The Moviegoer, a wonderful one.
Unfortunate for the fool who picks up this book to do more with it than crush a pill bug, that is about 2% of the book. The rest is a poorly edited barebones satire of autumn-century America, and as is the case with nearly all satire, difficult to keep engaged, even though it's couched in a thrilleresque mode.
I'm not sure what to make of Walker Percy anymore. Some paragraphs are gorgeous pinpricks of insight into what we all as modern Americans feel but have never been able to express, and the rest reads like a fifth-tier MFA dropout wrote it.
I guess that Percy attended UNC should absolve him of these follies, but I'm not sure even my love of the Tarheels can save this one.
Boo.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a cynical, farcical, joyful ride through the not-so-apocalyptic post-America. At the beginning, Percy tells us that the end of America has come, and what is left is a fractious, conceited, egoistic culture. The liberals have their manias, the conservatives theirs, and guerilla groups hold the perimeters of society. Hippies have withdrawn "to the swamp." Tom More is somewhere in the middle of it all--a bad Catholic whose only sorrow is his lack of penitence over his wicked ways.

Yet More is brilliant and has a gadget that he hopes will one day restore the Western soul to the body once again and restore what was lost. The adventure follows More over the course of a few days, but meanders through his past as we learn about More and how we are like him.

This is a creative novel full of humor, philosophical and religious feeling, and questioning what has brought Western culture so low.

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

i liked the end-of-the-world atmosphere of this one...i like how percy uses phrases like "a fifty-year-old blond stud pony of a man..."...yay! boy howdy! there's hope! book jacket says something about 'comtemporary man in an irrationally polarized society'...ummm.


maybe i ought to give this one another go. been awhile. i think this might be my favorite from percy...the moviegoer a close second...

paging through it just now, i think, yeah, ought to give this one another go...the tense the telling takes...he says/she says...

[Christopher Fulbright · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hard to justify the time spent writing this review but I can't just give something one star and not explain. I thought this story was slow and meandered too long without direction. There was too much introspection, it lacked a feeling of cohesion, and there was too little meaning for everything that was happening (which wasn't much) in the first 150 pages for me to justify spending any more time with it. I just didn't care and was bored out of my mind. I had hoped for more since I'd heard great things about Walker Percy's writing, but this was a letdown. I'll try The Moviegoer instead.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

What was probably at one time a revolutionary, subversive and thought-provoking novel is now only a curiosity in the wake of better books by Vonnegut and Robbins and Wilson. I don't think that I will ever understand the tendency of stories from this era (the 1970s) to be so paranoid and winky. Then again, I wasn't alive at the time.

This is not to say that Percy is a bad writer, but I've come to expect more from my questionable narrators and post-apocalyptic scenarios.

[Luke LeBar · Rating 5 out of 5]

With an opening line like “Now in these dread letter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?” I dare the reader not to read on.

Walker Percy deserves more popularity than he gets. Percy is a uniquely Catholic voice in literature. He was a part of that glorious group of Catholic contemporaries in America during the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s who were willing to point out that their faith and America didn’t exactly fit together well: Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, Garry Wills (maybe not as orthodox as the others but important nonetheless) and Walker Percy. These people saw that America tends to turn faith into badges, something to wear and show off, but which requires no commitment from the wearer. This is explicit in his essay in Commonweal, “Stoicism in the South.” Here, he accuses Southern Christians who oppose integration of Catholic Churches of not being Christian at all, or Christian in name only, basically because you can’t be racist and Christian. It is a brilliant essay, beautifully written, and much needed. The tension between the cultural needs of America (money, racism-not in all places, money, sex, and money) and the imperatives of Catholicism (faith, hope, charity, poverty, chastity, obedience) is one of the major themes in Percy’s writing.

While “Love in the Ruins” exploits that tension, it does so in a humorous and satirical way. The first fifty pages of this book are some of the funniest I have ever read. A schismatic sect of Catholicism called the America Catholic Church only says Mass in Latin (because “patriotism”) and plays the National Anthem at the elevation of the Eucharist. The right wing party is called the Knotheads and liberals are called Lefts. There are so many proctologists, so many. This book is a satire, it is not serious, but it should be taken seriously.

Percy quickly sketches the social outlook of America. It is an America divided. Right divided against Left. Black against white. Protestants against Catholic. Behaviorists against psychiatrists. Catholics against each other. Lots of people have called his setup prescient (the book was published in the 70’s). It is to an extent. It simplifies and accentuates American society much like a food web simplifies and accentuates an ecosystem.

The division gives everybody in the novel a sense of dread, a sense of doom. There is violence in this version of America and everybody blames everyone else for it. Percy shows deftly that America’s enemies are within. There are no external threats, no rivals. In this way Percy’s imagined America is very much different from our own. Our current world is filled with threats, rivals, and enemies. All of which, however, can only be challenged and overcome by defeating the enemies within that Percy identifies.

And who are the enemies within? It is each and every one of us. Every American, to an extent, is an enemy of a well functioning U.S.A. In one quote the main character Dr. Tom More brings us from the socio-political to the scale of the human soul: “…what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman.” In failing to be a “repairman” we fail our country. All of the characters in this book, More especially, suffer from what More calls “angelism/bestialism.” That is that problem of being abstracted from your self and the selves around you, which allows you to do horrific things and brings anxiety or you are brought to the level of base animal instinct for food, comfort, and sex. In short angelism/bestialism prevents us from loving one another and discovering meaning in our lives.

More is a repairman, or at least wants to be. He suffers most from angelism and bestialism. His solution is a machine, a piece of technology that adjusts what happens in the brain to cure angelism and bestialism. Some of the funniest parts of the book is when More and others try and explain the device in scientific nonsense. These hand waving explanations demonstrate the silliness of trying to solve problems of the soul with technology. Percy was a physician, someone who is acquainted with the power and limitations of science and technology. Our problems, those of meaning, cannot be solved by a technology. More’s lapsmeter is not an actual solution, it is an excuse. More creates a get rich quick scheme for the soul which ultimately ends in disaster.

So how can we be repairmen? How can we get past our abstraction and our brutishness and become integrated selves. Percy ends the book with a simple message: simply love your neighbor. The solution is work. I will leave the final word to Percy when Fr. Smith is giving confession to More:

“Meanwhile, forgive me but there are other things we must think about: like doing our jobs, you being a better doctor, I being a better priest, showing a bit of ordinary kindness to people, particularly our own families-unkindness to this close to us is such a pitiful thing-doing what we can for our poor unhappy country-things which, please forgive me, seem more important than dwelling on a few middle aged daydreams.”

[Dorothy McKnight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prophetic, insightful, dizzying.

[Sarah]

If you need to read a phrase a dozen times to truly appreciate it, if you prefer circular and paranoid ramblings to plot, if you like a main character that’s hard to root for, if you like swamps and vines, and if you don’t like women but do long for them, this might just be the book for you!

[Luke Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walker Percy has expertly taken us along a 4-day long journey close to the end of the world. Our protagonist is a bad Catholic—but he’s the best protagonist we could have asked for. Although he is troubled, depressed, a sex-addict, and a drunkard, he is also real and honest, and he’s the only character who keeps his head while the world falls apart.
The religious, Christian, and biblical references throughout the book make it an incredibly enjoyable read for religious people, especially those with some knowledge of Christianity and Catholicism.

[Shaina Herrmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for a book group that I'm in, otherwise I probably wouldn't ever have finished it. I'm being generous with the 3 stars... I understand why others enjoy it, but I was incredibly bored with it from start to finish.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1971, Love in the Ruins proposes that by the mid or late 1980s that the US will have been involved in a prolonged, 15-year war in Ecuador (which has split into a South and North, a la Korea), televisions have 3-D imagery, cars have become electric, and Republican and Democrats are openly, belligerently hostile at even the personal level, even outside elections. Percy also identifies racial politics, survivalist movements, grassroots insurrections, and a fractured US with regional political and racial coalitions. At the heart of the novel is the more rarefied fracturing of the human soul, characterized by schisms in the Catholic Church, the ongoing dualism of objective and subjective realities of science and faith, the conflation of love as a physical rather than a spiritual/emotive phenomenon, and the pros and cons of euthanasia. (In other words, Percy is pretty much describing the US as it was in 1971 and as it persists, in 2021.)

These portentous contrarieties all reside in the fictional parish of Paradise, Louisiana, where the 45-year-old doctor Tom More is negotiating events over a three-day period during a Bantu takeover, which includes intimations of the assassinations of the US President and Vice President. While More is pinned down at a freeway cloverleaf, hiding from a sniper, he begins to narrate how he arrived at that point. Naturally, near the end of the novel, events catch up to this initial moment, and we observe More and the revolutionary events in the parish proceed to a conclusion. At the novel’s beginning, More has sequestered three women at a long-abandoned Howard Johnson’s motel (a remnant, he explains, of the old Auto Age, when cars and travel were more prevalent). He asserts that he loves all three of the women with equal ardor, and his quandary about whether he can hold onto all three or settle for a single one is part and parcel of his own fractured state of being.

More is a small-town, general practice doctor, a descendant of the English Catholic martyr Thomas More. After his daughter dies and his wife leaves him, he becomes a faltering, not-quite lapsed Catholic, an alcoholic womanizer, and the inventor of a device that he believes can restore the angel-beast balance in a person’s soul (a process that entails a hand-held EEG device that shifts chemical balances in different parts of the brain). More serves as an enlightened (however bewildered) representative of the lost and divided man. What Percy has done in this novel is contrive a farce that exaggerates, yet treats seriously the existential malaise of mid and late 20th-century America. While some of the broader strokes are visible as farce, there are many threads and themes in the story that I found difficult to account for, wondering if I were being treated to an instance of simple genial verisimilitude, or whether these instances were somehow part of that larger, broader farce. When More’s hand-held device (the More Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer) is hijacked by Art Immelmann, a figure representing several prestigious foundations, who promises More that he’ll win the Nobel Prize, we are observing a Faustian bargain in the making. Immelmann has all the markings of a Lucifer, and he serves as catalyst for the vehemence of the mayhem that ensues.

What Percy does extremely well is populate this novel with an extraordinary collection of unassimilable characters, all of them more or less on good terms with More, which speaks to his everyman status. As well as making the point that a whole(some) community is filled with contrarieties, this multitude of characters also provides for a variety of incidents and exchanges that are comic and genial at the same time, flavored with Southern and Louisiana-specific idiosyncracies. Along with the multitude of characters, there are a multitude of events that never seem to jibe in the bigger picture, and these again, I feel, support the overall thesis that a vibrant, healthy whole contains (often discordant) multitudes. Love in the Ruins is a sloppy, genial, shaggy dog story that only barely can contain itself, exuberantly shuffling/shaking off/out so many ideas and incidents that it’s difficult to see how everything fits.

Percy has a go at making his particular pet themes into a comedy, one narrated by an amiable drunk who’s dazzled by the prospect of loving three different women, even as he’s bemused by the increasingly strange behavior of everyone else in his parish. As he more than once suggests, it is really a case of “physician, heal thyself.” Just as the lonely, alienated individual uses the image of his suicide as an anodyne, so Tom More has used the vision of a world comically, ludicrously torn apart to restore/reconcile himself (to the world).