Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy

First published: 1971

Type of plot: Social satire

Time of work: The end of the twentieth century

Locale: A community in Louisiana

Principal Characters:

• Dr. Thomas More, the protagonist/narrator, an alcoholic psychiatrist and “bad Catholic”
• Moira Schaffner, his girlfriend, a secretary at the Love Clinic
• Lola Rhoades, another girlfriend, an accomplished cellist
• Ellen Oglethorpe, his office nurse, a beautiful but tyrannical Georgia Presbyterian
• Art Immelmann, a mysterious stranger who claims to be a liaison between the National Institute of Mental Health and the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations but apparently has more infernal connections

The Novel

On July 4, Dr. Thomas More, with a carbine on his knees, sits in a pine grove on the southwest cusp of the decaying interstate cloverleaf. A sniper has shot at him earlier in the day, and from this point he commands a view of all four directions. In one quadrant is the city, inhabited largely by conservative Christian businessmen; in another, the Paradise Estates, a suburb where he ordinarily lives in a house inherited from his deceased wife. In still another direction, there is the federal complex, which includes the hospital where the narrator works, a medical school, the NASA facility, the Behavioral Institute, the Geriatrics Center, and the Love Clinic. In the remaining quadrant, the huge Honey Island swamp shelters assorted social rebels and castoffs: white derelicts, young dropouts pursuing love, drugs, and the simple life, and ferocious black Bantus, who use the swamp as guerrilla base for launching raids against outlying suburbs and shopping centers.

Immediately below Dr. More’s lookout post, an old, abandoned Howard Johnson’s motel, long deserted after a devastating raid in years past, is a temporary shelter for Dr. More’s two girlfriends, Moira and Lola, and his loyal nurse, Ellen, whom he also loves. The action of the novel covers, in retrospect, the preceding four days, during which this awkward personal and public crisis came to a head.

The amiable Dr. More, though hardly responsible for the persistent failure of American society to eradicate racial inequality and bigotry, does nevertheless share some obscure guilt for the peculiarly volatile situation on this particular day. He has learned that a racial uprising is planned for the Fourth of July, with the Bantus intending to take over the Paradise Estates. He has been discreetly warned by a black friend and an old Catholic priest to vacate his suburban house and move into his mother’s place in town.

What Dr. More really is worrying about, however, is a more general catastrophe, a possibly explosive and poisonous interaction between the heavy sodium which characterizes the soil in the area and fallout from the gross misuse of his invention, the More Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer. He has, through ambition and pride, allowed this sensitive instrument to fall into ignorant and evil hands.

The nondescript Art Immelmann plays the Mephistopheles to More’s Faust in this matter. Art’s original offer was to see that More’s article explaining the lapsometer would be published in a prestigious journal of psychiatry. He promised, moreover, to use his influence with the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations for substantial grant money so that More could submit the device to extensive scientific testing. The lapsometer measures certain psychic forces in the brain, especially angelism and bestialism, which may be responsible for the increasing irrationality and instability among otherwise healthy Americans. Art wants patent rights in exchange for this service.

When Art offers an appendage to the lapsometer so that it not only measures psychic imbalances but also amends or at least changes them with the twist of the dial, More signs the fateful agreement, dreaming of a Nobel Peace Prize in his future. To his consternation, however, Art passes out lapsometers to ignorant students, with hilarious but potentially dangerous results. Later, on this eventful Independence Day, Dr. More manages, by praying to his sainted ancestor and namesake Sir Thomas More for help, to exorcise his devil.

An epilogue five years later shows More living in relative peace in former slave quarters, happily married to one of his sweethearts. He has dissipated his first wife’s fortune in an unsuccessful attempt to promote his lapsometer, but he still believes in its promise. Racial prejudice may be partly responsible for the doctor’s cool reception as a scientific innovator, since the relative prestige of blacks and whites is now reversed—not, however, because of the Bantu revolt five years ago. Blacks are now beginning to demonstrate some of the psychological pathologies that had afflicted the ruling white class.

The Characters

Although Percy sketches many of the characters with the swift, deadly accurate strokes of comic caricature, his protagonist is a fully developed, complex, seriocomic hero. Yet he is also a kind of Everyman, sharing many of the mental/emotional impediments typical of each of the social groups so deftly caricatured. The dominant political parties, for example, have been renamed (a contribution in each case of the opposition) and display characteristic pathological symptoms. Conservative Republicans, now called Knotheads, often suffer from large bowel complaints, making proctology one of the two major medical specialties. Dr. More shares this difficulty. Though by no means a political Knothead, he is a conservative Roman Catholic in a world where most Catholics have formed splinter groups. Like so many of Percy’s protagonists, and like the author himself, he professes to believe in the traditional Catholic Christian message. Dr. More admits, however, that he loves women, music, science, whiskey, and God, in that order—and his fellowman hardly at all. He has not “eaten Christ”—that is, taken Communion—since his daughter Samantha died, his wife ran away with a heathen Englishman, and he himself turned to drink.

He suffers even more from the tendency toward abstraction and unreasonable terrors that have become typical of the Lefts (Democrats) or Leftpapasane, a term devised by Knotheads, standing for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Antipollution, Sex, Abortion Now, and Euthanasia. Lefts often suffer from sexual impotence as well, for the tendency to abstraction results in alienation from the body and concrete reality. That is why Lefts generally flock to psychologists rather than proctologists.

Dr. More does not suffer from sexual impotence, but he does have an ironically related problem. He tends to fall in love quite sincerely with one young woman after another, which is perhaps a symptom of his religio-erotic tendency toward abstraction. That is why his personal life is complicated by those three beautiful girls, not to mention the enticing young dropout he met once in the swamp. He seems to have less control over this kind of abstraction than over the variety that scientists, including himself, tend to assume with their pose of objectivity. In fact, he is philosophically and professionally opposed to the prevailing behavioralist orientation of his medical colleagues. The characterizations of women in the novel are more flat, but they are sufficient for their fictional purposes. They help to differentiate psychological propensities in the protagonist. Hester, the girl in the swamp, is perhaps simply an embodiment of a new Eve, wiped clean of civilization’s sins. Dr. More is too intelligent, however, to assume that the Garden of Eden can be reentered in its original simplicity.

Moira’s attraction is almost exclusively physical. She is sentimental, romantic, unintelligent, but adorable in an amoral, mindless sort of way. The elegant Lola, musician and breeder of fine horses, appeals to the well-developed aesthetic sensibilities of Dr. More. Ellen Oglethorpe, somewhat more expansively developed, maintains a rather puritanical emphasis on morality and duty through most of the story but ripens into the mother/wife who is exactly what the erring Tom More needs to keep his irrational terrors and longings under control. Art Immelmann is an inspired creation but is necessarily a caricature, as befits a modern Mephistopheles. He has certain affinities with Fyodor Dostoevski’s shabby, middle-class devil in Bratya Karamazovy (1879-1880; The Brothers Karamazov). Percy excels in the comic effect of realistic detail fused with surrealism and subtle clues that a sordidly ordinary person is not what he seems.

Critical Context

Percy has a considerable affinity with the religious existentialist Søren Kierkegaard and for Dostoevski’s peculiar vision of human absurdity and moral chaos. He received the 1971 National Catholic Book Award for Love in the Ruins. Something of a madcap masterpiece, this satire was a popular success, though some critics prefer the more subtle humor of Percy’s later novel The Second Coming (1980), which also deals with love, mental illness, moral confusion, and the blundering spiritual quest. The later book also develops more precisely a minor theme of Love in the Ruins: the way in which the misuse of language contributes to popular mindlessness and alienation. Percy shares the contemporary intellectual interest in semantics and semiotics. In both Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming, he tends to emphasize the antic absurdities of clichés and jargon that define contemporary attitudes, though not the sinister intent behind what George Orwell called Doublethink.

Percy’s concern for language is both moral and professional. The specifically human world, often quite different from the empirical world of sense experience, is created by the words used to describe it. Percy is concerned not so much with the deliberate villains of society but with the limitations of goodness in well-intentioned people who cannot “name” reality and thus do not know it. Percy recognizes this difficulty in himself as a “Christian novelist,” for he knows that the Christian message, as ordinarily expressed, is a tired anachronism in the modern world. For a discussion of this ironic difficulty of the writer, one should read Percy’s The Message in the Bottle (1975), especially the chapter entitled “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World,” which is especially relevant to Love in the Ruins. For further satiric comment on the American way of love and sex, the section on “The Promiscuous Self,” in Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983), is both provocative and entertaining.

Bibliography

Allen, William Rodney. Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Allen reads Percy as a distinctly American, particularly southern writer, claiming that the formative event in Percy’s life was his father’s suicide, not his reading of existentialist writers or conversion to Roman Catholicism. Allen’s readings of individual novels emphasize the presence of weak fathers and rejection of the southern stoic heritage on the part of Percy’s protagonists.

Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. An early but always intelligent and certainly sensitive reading of Percy’s essays and novels by a leading psychiatrist whose main contention is that Percy’s work speaks directly to modern humanity. In Coles’s words, Percy “has balanced a contemporary Christian existentialism with the pragmatism and empiricism of an American physician.”

Desmond, John F. At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1997. Chapters on Percy and T. S. Eliot; on Percy’s treatment of suicide; on Percy and Flannery O’Connor; on his treatment of myth, history, and religion; and his philosophical debt to pragmatism and Charles Sanders Peirce. A useful, accessible introduction to Percy’s background in theology and philosophy.

Hardy, John Edward. The Fiction of Walker Percy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. The originality of this book, comprising an introduction and six chapters (one for each of the novels, including The Thanatos Syndrome), derives from Hardy’s choosing to read the novels in terms of internal formal matters rather than (as is usually the case) Percy’s essays, existentialism, Catholicism, or southern background. Hardy sees Percy as a novelist, not a prophet.

Lawson, Lewis A. Following Percy: Essays on Walker Percy’s Work. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1988. Collects essays originally published between 1969 and 1984 by one of Percy’s most dedicated, prolific, and knowledgeable commentators. Discussions of The Moviegoer and Lancelot predominate.

Percy, Walker. Conversations with Walker Percy, edited by Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. This indispensable volume collects all the most important interviews with Percy, including one (with the editors) previously unpublished. The volume is especially important for biographical background, influences, discussion of writing habits, and the author’s comments on individual works through Lost in the Cosmos.

Quinlan, Kieran. Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Chapters on Percy as novelist and philosopher, existentialist, explorer of modern science. Recommended for the advanced student who has already read Desmond. Includes notes and bibliography.

Tharpe, Jac. Walker Percy. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Reading Percy as a Roman Catholic novelist concerned chiefly with eschatological matters, Tharpe divides his study into ten chapters: “Biography, Background, and Influences,” “Theory of Art,” “Christendom,” “Techniques,” one chapter on each of the five novels through The Second Coming, and conclusion. The annotated secondary bibliography is especially good.

Tharpe, Jac, ed. Walker Percy: Art and Ethics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980. Ten essays by diverse hands, plus a bibliography. The essays focus on settings, existential sources, Martin Heidegger, Percy’s theory of language, the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, Percy’s politics, and Lancelot (in terms of his essays, Roman Catholicism, medieval sources, and semiotics).