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Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist, by Kieran Quinlan, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. 242pp. paper $11.95 cloth $35.00
KIERAN QUINLAN'S Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist is a noteworthy attempt to come to terms with the thought of the remarkable physician-philosopher-novelist. Quinlan claims to be the first to take Percy seriously as a Catholic thinker. He believes he has discerned why Percy was one of the few novelists (or for that matter philosophers) in our time actually to have "made a difference" in the lives of his readers. But in fact Quinlan hopes to enlighten those who take Percy seriously as an intellectual or moral guide: they are mistaken if they believe Percy is a first-rate thinker or artist, if they believe that anything fundamental he says is true.
Quinlan really means to have written something of an intellectual expose. Percy's Catholic faith, he reveals, is "highly orthodox," a version that has been authoritatively "discredited" bythe intellectual progress of the past forty years. All of Percy's talents as a thinker and artist have been deployed to defend polemically that faith. Percy was the last Catholic novelist because the vision that animated his writing is no longer "viable." It was the product of a particular moment in Catholic intellectual history that has passed.
Quinlan is irritated by Percy's pretensions, which he rightly judges to be quite extraordinary today. Percy said he was a Catholic thinker because what the Church teaches is true. He also said he was a realist, which means he defended the proposition that the human mind can know something about the truth about nature, including one's own nature. Percy adds that there is a natural foundation for what distinguishes human beings as self-conscious knowers from other animals. Quinlan concludes, indignantly, that these views are so intellectually unfashionable that rational inquiry could not have possibly played a significant part in Percy's holding of them.
The consensus of intellectuals today is that one's perception of the truth is determined by the culture of one's time and place. Quinlan employs that fashionable view to tame Percy's thought by locating his claims in cultural context. Percy's intellectual development occurred in the 1940s and early 1950s. It was in the context of the revival of...