Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...that all of these sundry things share one characteristic: they are means of connecting ourselves with "the mystery" that makes love important to the human race. The author extends his argument by noting that although mystery likes movement, we only perceive it when we stand still. Somehow, the reader gleans, the title of the novel relates to this concept...
...modern man in the story of a Wall Street lawyer turned retired golfer. But by the time the novel reaches its own crisis Percy has launched so many conflicting ideas into the narrative--like a crazed club pro madly driving his golf balls into the fairway--that the reader has no idea which to follow, which to ignore. Will Barrett, Percy's protagonist, leads a remarkably untroubled life, driving his Mercedes 450 SEL to the golf course and then back home. Only memories disturb his endowed existence: as This Second Coming unfolds he mentally pieces together the events...
...Percy's last novel Lancelot, the reader can't be sure whether these ideas are the product of a sane mind, ideas with which the author concurs--or whether they are lunatic ravings. It's a very convenient device for Percy. He can say controversial things about war, about Nazis and Jews, about other sensitive subjects and still leave room for himself to disavow then if a reader gets too offended. But in The Second Coming, Percy introduces a new sort of character--the genuine schizophrenic, not a mouthpiece for his own questionable ideas but a true dysfunctional. Allison...
...asks the reader--Percy? Allison? It would be very easy for he author to clean up some of these passages--like Barrett's first-person tirades against his father, unexpectedly thrown into passages of third-person narrative--simply by substituting a name for a pronoun here, adding quotation marks there...
...always ready with a bizarre scheme to rescue herself and her bemused followers. Toward the end, in the 1880s, matters seemed hope less. She was living in exile in Germany, fat, sick, impoverished, deserted by the faithful and under attack for fakery by the Society for Psychical Research. The reader feels like cheering when she turns up a few months later in London, outrageous as ever, leaking cosmological eye wash with every wheeze, as the head of a large and adoring band of occultists...