There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, 'Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?' and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore.

When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. A good book to travel with.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Percy was that rarest of creatures, an educated gentleman, a true man of the humanities like the bourbon he writes about, he has a complex, heady flavor all his own.

Always, Percy strives to keep in balance a very real spiritual talent, the abstract theories of science in which he was trained (as a doctor), and the precise, forgiving sense of human frailty in which the best southern writing is grounded. It does not have the brooding elegance of his best fiction, but it has a stubborn integrity and a sense of the future. This is diligent, unassuming writing, always as clear and simple as the subject will allow, and sometimes deadly. The title of his 1957 essay 'The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry' is prescient, as are his queries into a profession that has since splintered in all directions. He writes about science, linguistics, literature, and the South, in ascending order of success, and while he is no threat to Chomsky and his successors, his essay on bourbon puts him up there with Flann O'Brien on the subject of whiskey. He wrote novels with plenty of thought-content, and his nonfiction has plenty of storytelling. The nonfiction has a droll, dry, carefully laid-back honesty that shares something important with such masters of American English as Russell Baker, James Thurber, and Mark Twain but Percy can also be as intense as Graham Greene in the earnestness of his Catholicism. His observation that the purpose of the novel is to give pleasure can be applied to this work as well. Percy was a quintessentially American writer with a voice of his own that was never compromised. A pungent, revealing collection of lectures, essays, and interviews-some previously published in Harper's, The Georgia Review, etc.-by the late novelist (d.

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