Walker Percy (1916-1990) had a message, but he was a storyteller, not a preacher, and his novels alluded rather than stated. An old-school Southerner who opposed segregation, he was a satirist who found humor in the commercialization of Dixie (his car salesmen wear Confederate uniforms) and sadness in the commercialization of human values and the homogenization of everywhere. Jessica Hooten Wilson provides an entertaining exegesis of Percy’s novels and finds his literary ancestors in The Odyssey, Don Quixote and Dostoyevsky. One doesn’t have to accept Percy’s Roman Catholicism to concur with him on the banality of consumerism, the danger of far-right conspiracy mongering and the splitting of reality into a set of binary this-thats, yes-nos. The protagonist of Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), realizes that the mediated reality of film has limited his engagement with the world. What would he make of the virtual reality of 2018?
