Walker Percy

On May 10 of this year, Binx Bolling, a stockbroker in New Orleans, emerged from the matinee screening of a Hollywood film and was told the news. Across town, word reached Lancelot Lamar in his madhouse cell. In Manhattan, Will Barrett, employed at night as a maintenance engineer at Macy's, received word as he was training his high-powered telescope on a young woman sitting on a bench in Central Park. And in Covington, La., across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, Dr.

In an essay called "Stoicism in the South" the novelist Walker Percy observed: "The greatness of the South . . . had always a stronger Greek flavor than it ever had a Christian." So it is no surprise that in "The Moviegoer," Percy's award-winning 1961 novel, the patrician aunt sends her somewhat unmoored nephew a stern memo quoting the Stoic philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius, not St. Paul or New Orleans' Archbishop Rummel.

Walker Percy, the late-blooming novelist who wrote in the manner of European existentialists yet whose fictional milieus were distinctly American, died of cancer Thursday at his home in Covington, La. The Associated Press said he was 74 when he died at his home on the banks of the Bogue Falaya River, across Lake Pontchatrain from New Orleans.

I met Walker Percy in New Orleans in 1977. It was a cool autumn afternoon. The city glowed in soft golden sunlight and deep blue shadows. There was, I remember, a chilly wind blowing off the river. I had moved to the city less than a year before, after graduating from college, and had gotten a job writing for Figaro, a weekly newspaper. As it turned out, Percy was a fan of the paper, read it weekly, and happened to see my review of his latest novel, "Lancelot."

Unless the name on the door is "Richard M. Ratzan MD," patients flipping through the available reading matter in a doctor's waiting room would hardly expect to have their traumas soothed by applications of medicinal literary trivia.

Sin, semiotics and sucking the heads off crawfish were among the lifelong preoccupations of Walker Percy, as we discover in "Signposts in a Strange Land," a fat and satisfying anthology of the late novelist's essays, public addresses, letters, interviews and other literary ephemera.

On a chilly afternoon, as Manhattan's rush hour filled the streets and sidewalks, friends and admirers of the late Walker Percy gathered in a hushed midtown church Wednesday to remember his living legacy as a writer. Percy, whose powerful novels about the South are studies in human faith and despair, was called a titan of American letters by such luminaries as Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Wilfrid Sheed, Mary Lee Settle and Stanley Kauffmann.

In an essay called "Stoicism in the South" the novelist Walker Percy observed: "The greatness of the South . . . had always a stronger Greek flavor than it ever had a Christian." So it is no surprise that in "The Moviegoer," Percy's award-winning 1961 novel, the patrician aunt sends her somewhat unmoored nephew a stern memo quoting the Stoic philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius, not St. Paul or New Orleans' Archbishop Rummel.

I met Walker Percy in New Orleans in 1977. It was a cool autumn afternoon. The city glowed in soft golden sunlight and deep blue shadows. There was, I remember, a chilly wind blowing off the river. I had moved to the city less than a year before, after graduating from college, and had gotten a job writing for Figaro, a weekly newspaper. As it turned out, Percy was a fan of the paper, read it weekly, and happened to see my review of his latest novel, "Lancelot."

Sin, semiotics and sucking the heads off crawfish were among the lifelong preoccupations of Walker Percy, as we discover in "Signposts in a Strange Land," a fat and satisfying anthology of the late novelist's essays, public addresses, letters, interviews and other literary ephemera.

On a chilly afternoon, as Manhattan's rush hour filled the streets and sidewalks, friends and admirers of the late Walker Percy gathered in a hushed midtown church Wednesday to remember his living legacy as a writer. Percy, whose powerful novels about the South are studies in human faith and despair, was called a titan of American letters by such luminaries as Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Wilfrid Sheed, Mary Lee Settle and Stanley Kauffmann.

Henry Kisor, whose story this is, is stone deaf and has been so since an illness at age 3. Now in his 50s, he is a working journalist at the height of his profession, book editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, husband (of a hearing woman), and father of college-age sons. Between the illness of the child and the success of the man lies the story, a lifelong struggle against what Dr. Johnson rightly called "the most desperate of human calamities."

On May 10 of this year, Binx Bolling, a stockbroker in New Orleans, emerged from the matinee screening of a Hollywood film and was told the news. Across town, word reached Lancelot Lamar in his madhouse cell. In Manhattan, Will Barrett, employed at night as a maintenance engineer at Macy's, received word as he was training his high-powered telescope on a young woman sitting on a bench in Central Park. And in Covington, La., across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, Dr.

Walker Percy, the late-blooming novelist who wrote in the manner of European existentialists yet whose fictional milieus were distinctly American, died of cancer Thursday at his home in Covington, La. The Associated Press said he was 74 when he died at his home on the banks of the Bogue Falaya River, across Lake Pontchatrain from New Orleans.

"Thanatos" is the Greek word for death, and in his newest novel, which might be described as a philosophical thriller laced with Southern Discomfort, Walker Percy proposes that tenderness leads to the death ovens. He proposes this in the person of a disarranged Catholic priest who lives on a fire-watch platform in the Louisiana scrubland and periodically comes down to preach. But with Percy, who is ingenious and paradoxical, truth increases as the square of disarrangement.

Henry Kisor, whose story this is, is stone deaf and has been so since an illness at age 3. Now in his 50s, he is a working journalist at the height of his profession, book editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, husband (of a hearing woman), and father of college-age sons. Between the illness of the child and the success of the man lies the story, a lifelong struggle against what Dr. Johnson rightly called "the most desperate of human calamities."

Unless the name on the door is "Richard M. Ratzan MD," patients flipping through the available reading matter in a doctor's waiting room would hardly expect to have their traumas soothed by applications of medicinal literary trivia.

"Thanatos" is the Greek word for death, and in his newest novel, which might be described as a philosophical thriller laced with Southern Discomfort, Walker Percy proposes that tenderness leads to the death ovens. He proposes this in the person of a disarranged Catholic priest who lives on a fire-watch platform in the Louisiana scrubland and periodically comes down to preach. But with Percy, who is ingenious and paradoxical, truth increases as the square of disarrangement.