The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy

First published: 1987

Type of plot: Science fiction

Time of work: The 1990’s

Locale: Feliciana Parish, Louisiana

Principal Characters:

• Tom More, a psychiatrist who has just been released from federal prison
• Lucy Lipscomb, More’s cousin, an epidemiologist who becomes involved in his investigation
• Bob Comeaux, More’s parole officer on the medical ethics committee, an instigator of the plot that More uncovers
• Ellen More, Tom More’s second wife, who has suddenly become a bridge expert
• John Van Dorn, Ellen More’s bridge partner and operator of the Belle Ame Academy
• Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, a friend of Tom More who runs a hospice

The Novel

The Thanatos Syndrome is in some ways an extension of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (1971), also narrated by Tom More. In The Thanatos Syndrome, More confronts a plot to adulterate the drinking water for his area with heavy sodium. Although the chemical has the desirable effects of reducing crime rates and teenage pregnancy, it causes people to revert to childlike thinking and speaking patterns and also changes women’s bodies from a menstrual to an estrous cycle. The novel’s characters debate the issues involved in programs of social control in this primary plot as well as in a secondary plot involving a hospice.

As the novel opens, More has just returned to his home in Feliciana, Louisiana, after spending two years in federal prison for selling prescription drugs illegally. More, a psychiatrist, is asked by Bob Comeaux, his parole officer on the medical ethics committee, to examine a patient. More notices that Mickey LaFaye, formerly one of his patients, no longer demonstrates her former symptoms of agoraphobia and anxiety but now speaks in simple sentences and jumps from topic to topic. She also shows somewhat aggressive sexuality and an ability to recall obscure facts.

When More meets other former patients and acquaintances, he notices the same types of behavior and absence of former psychiatric symptoms. Even his wife, Ellen, is affected. She manifests her increased memory in her newfound skill at bridge, a game at which she has become an expert and won tournaments with her partner, John Van Dorn. More suspects that something unusual is going on but receives no support in his investigation from Comeaux, who appears to want More to stop investigating. He offers More a lucrative government consulting job while simultaneously threatening to alter the conditions of his parole if he does not take the job.

Lucy Lipscomb, an epidemiologist and More’s cousin, tells him that she thinks something peculiar is going on. She taps into government data banks and discovers that all the people in whom More saw changed behavior showed high levels of heavy sodium. More thinks that the behavioral changes result from cortical deficits caused by the chemical. Lipscomb and More quickly trace the sodium to a water intake valve coming from the local power plant.

When More, Lipscomb’s uncle, and one of her friends investigate the intake valve, they are arrested for trespassing. Bob Comeaux bails them out and, in private, tells More that the heavy sodium is part of a government experiment to reduce crime. He reiterates his job offer, stating that More will be able to monitor the program from inside the system if he takes the job. In the meantime, Lipscomb discovers that no government agency formally acknowledges the heavy sodium program.

John Van Dorn, Ellen’s bridge partner, also works at the power plant and runs the Belle Ame Academy, which More’s children attend. More discovers that Van Dorn knows about the diversion of heavy sodium into the water supply and agrees with the short-term goals of the program. Lipscomb examines some of the children at the Belle Ame Academy, observing signs of sexual abuse and noticing that the children appear to expect sexual behavior from her toward them.

At this point, the primary plot is interrupted by a section entitled “Father Smith’s Confession.” More had known Father Simon Rinaldo Smith as a parish priest and had talked with him while Father Smith was in a counseling program for alcoholics near the prison where More was serving his sentence. Father Smith had abandoned his duties at the local parish and moved into a fire tower, refusing to come down, when government budget cuts forced the closing of his hospice. Comeaux wanted to convert the hospice into a center for euthanasia. In his confession, Father Smith discusses his time spent in Germany and confesses that if he had been German he would have joined the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi secret police. This confession ties into the main story line by reiterating questions of the morality of social control through medical means and by reinforcing Comeaux’s heavy-handedness in promoting his programs.

The climax of the novel comes when More, Lipscomb’s uncle, and her friend return to the Belle Ame Academy and discover photographic evidence of sexual molestation of the children there. Knowing that this evidence may be dismissed in court and that some of the adults involved have already had charges of sexual abuse dismissed, More devises a plan to incriminate them. He forces them to drink water with an extremely high concentration of heavy sodium. He summons the sheriff, who witnesses their regression to primate sexual behavior caused by drinking the treated water. Arrests of all the adults who run the academy lead to its closure. More bargains with Comeaux to end the experiment and reopen Father Smith’s hospice, with increased government funding.

The Characters

More is introduced as a character alienated from his society. He wonders, when he comes back to Feliciana, whether something really has changed or if he has simply misremembered life outside prison. Throughout the novel, he questions his beliefs in the way the world operates, wondering about the propriety of running the heavy sodium experiment on unknowing subjects, including the children at the Belle Ame Academy. His is the voice of a social conscience.

More’s character is presented sympathetically. Even his conviction for selling prescription drugs is cast positively: He sold the drugs because he needed the money, but he also thought that they would help truckers to adjust to their schedules of long hauls without sufficient breaks to sleep. Readers will sympathize with the facts that his practice has all but disappeared and his wife no longer stays home, even though both are largely results of his own actions. His narration is friendly and informal, encouraging readers to like him.

The villains in this story do not appear in stereotype form. Their behavior appears to stem from humanitarian goals of reducing crime and, in Van Dorn’s case, increasing abilities. He uses water treated with heavy sodium to improve the mathematical skills of children at the Belle Ame Academy. Comeaux thinks like a stereotypical government bureaucrat, concerned with outcomes but not bothered by the moral questions involved in his actions. His threats to More come in subtle forms, and he appears to be genuinely interested in getting More involved in his program.

More’s patients are mostly one-dimensional. Percy uses them primarily as examples of unusual behavior that put More on the track of Comeaux and Van Dorn. Each, however, also has a small story of his or her own. Through these minor characters, Walker discusses religious communes, couples counseling and counselors, politics in El Salvador, people’s desires to behave correctly (as defined in part by the false reality of television characters), and race relations.

Apart from More, Father Smith is the most developed character. Prior to Father Smith’s confession, More establishes that he is mentally unsound. Percy uses Father Smith to question some of society’s beliefs, asking whether it is Father Smith or instead the rest of society that is crazy. Father Smith believes that language has failed to “signify,” that words no longer carry meaning, with the exception of the word “Jew.” Ironically, More is unable to comprehend much of Father Smith’s side of their conversations.

Father Smith’s confession to More, coming just prior to the climax, highlights the issues raised in the novel. Father Smith chose the priesthood rather than a career in medicine because, as he says, one must choose between life and death. While in Germany, he witnessed doctors experimenting on and killing children in the name of helping humanity. He concludes that he would have joined the SS, as he saw sense in the German commitment to the state. The confession is the most direct statement of the idea that the world has entered what More calls “the age of thanatos,” in which society collectively has a death wish.

Critical Context

Comparisons of The Thanatos Syndrome to George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-four (1948) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) are unavoidable. All three novels discuss the morality of social control through medical means, each pointing out the dangers of going too far in trying to improve society. Percy’s book adds religious content to the discussion and updates the social problems supposedly being solved.

The Thanatos Syndrome is Percy’s last novel. It illustrates many of the themes common in both his fiction and his essays, themes of religious belief, racial relations, social control, and personal identity. Percy earned his M.D., but his practice was interrupted by an episode of tuberculosis, during which he began an intense study of philosophy that manifests itself in each of his novels. He turned his attention to writing and earned the National Book Award for his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961). That novel introduced the idea of people identifying more with films than with real life, a theme touched on in The Thanatos Syndrome.

The Thanatos Syndrome brings back the character of Tom More from Love in the Ruins. In the earlier book, More was declared crazy, and his first wife left him to join a religious cult, much as Ellen is attracted by the Pentecostals at the end of The Thanatos Syndrome. More waited for the end of the world and became an alcoholic in the earlier book; here, he appears to have conquered alcoholism, though he is still prone to knocking back a shot of Jack Daniels, and he takes positive action to save the world from itself.

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 Pierce. 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 Saunders Peirce, Percy’s politics, and Lancelot (in terms of his essays, Roman Catholicism, medieval sources, and semiotics).