Lancelot

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 17

Lancelot

Lancelot. By Walker Percy. Seeker and Yfarburg. 257 pp. $10.50.

“When was the last time you saw anybody horrified?” asks Lancelot Lamar of a priest who visits him in his ceil. The modem Lancelot, with a

grand Louisiana mansion restored by his wife’s Texas oil money, has been on a new quest for the Holy Grail. In a twist to the old Arthurian legend, this time it is Merlin (an ageing film director) who is the adulterer. Lancelot, by accident, stumbles on his wife’s transgressions, and in a new clarity of understanding he begins to know the nature of evil and the sense of horror which he (and Walker Percy) believe the twentieth century has lost. Readers who recall Percy’s earlier book “The Moviegoer” will not be disappointed by “Lancelot.” But it is a thoroughly unfashionable book. Lancelot, from his cell, condemns joyless promiscuity, banal social workers, women who refuse to chose between being whores or ladies — everyone, in fact, who has lost the sense that evil is evil. He even dares to suggest that people should be held responsible for their own actions. “Lancelot” has been promoted as a “comic novel.” The comedy is rich and sustained, but many readers might decide that this search for sin through the rotting life of New Orleans is too serious merely to be laughed at.