February 17, 1977
Books of the Times:
"Camelot Lost"
Lancelot by Walker Percy
Lehmann-Haupt interprets Walker Percy’s Lancelot as a tale of a “Southern gentleman [that] confronts the decadence of America in the 1970’s and is driven nearly insane by it.” In his review, Lehmann-Haupt includes a quote from Lancelot himself, from his room in the Center of Abberant Behavior, where he claims, “I cannot tolerate this age, I won’t have it…the great whorehouse and fagdom of America…I do not propose to live in Sodom or to raise my son and daughters in Sodom…Millions agree with me and know that this age is not tolerable, but no one will act except the crazies and they are part of the age.”
Lehmann-Haupt asserts that Lancelot, the narrator, uses an unconvincing voice throughout that is uneven. He compares Lancelot’s narrative voice changes to that of “the old radio show ‘inner Sanctum,’ Tennessee Williams, and Norman Mailer. Lehmann-Haupt clearly is not in favor of Percy’s style in Lancelot. He suggests that because Lancelot addresses a listener that never responds, it “makes his monologue sound highly stilted,” and “means [Lancelot] must single-voicedly carry the whole burden of the story.” He also claims that after the infidelity is established, “the story disintegrates into a rather tedious Gothic tale of revenge, climaxed, unsurprisingly enough, by the burning of Lancelot’s family mansion, Belle Isle.”
The reviewer also makes a comment on Walker Percy’s choice of character names. He claims that, “such names do not lend the novel mythic timelessness. They merely add up to an elbow in the ribs, as well as an excuse for Lancelot to call his obsession with his wife’s sin a ‘quest…for the Unholy Grail,’ his theory being the somewhat, shopworn .”
The review ends with a few ideas from the novel that Lehmann-Haupt finds upsetting. For example:
the treatment of an educated Negro as his family slave, his ridicule of the pretensions of modern art, his snobbery toward the socially inferior longing for acceptance and, most of all, his abhorrence of the liberated woman and his insistence that after his revolution ‘the New Woman will have perfect freedom. She will be free to be a lady or a whore’ – all this, some might insist, is simply the raving of a blue-blooded reactionary ill-equipped to comprehend the complexities of a postindustrial democratic age.
Of course, it is important to remember that this review is simply the opinion of one critic. There are a thousand others that may or may not agree with Lehmann-Haupt, but should be considered as well. Ultimately, every reader responds differently to every literary work.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/percy-lancelot.html