Love In The Ruins, by Walker Percy

I must admit that even as a reader of odd books that this author had not came across my radar until I was looking for random books from Roman Catholics.  This book happens to be about a bad Roman Catholic named Thomas More and by someone who appears to be a self-proclaimed bad Catholic as well.  Purporting to tell a story about the future, at a time near the end of the world, this book is surprisingly on point about a great deal of aspects that are far beyond the early 1970’s when this book was written.  Admittedly, most of those insights are trends taken from the times in which the author himself lived and worked–racial and political division, for example, and a total lack of patriotism from leftists–but the author’s recognition of the decline of sexual morality and technology involving cell phones and even the success of Apple as a technology company is something that the author can take some credit for.  There are some ways in which this book is sad, but the preferable response to this book would be to laugh before one mourns, because the laughter will likely come quicker but the mourning will last for longer.

This particular book spends most of its roughly 400 pages of space dealing with the period of a few days near a July 4th where the protagonist, named after an English Catholic saint of the Reformation era, serves as a psychologist for a creepy government project where he has invented a box that helps to determine people’s character in various metrics.  While he seeks to make his name and preserve his research, America is falling apart around him, with grass growing through highways and dingy hotels being places where people seek to store items for the coming disaster, and where even the effort of going to a country club ends up in massive amounts of violence.  Whether or not one agrees with the author’s politics, it is hard not to be shocked at how the author goes about describing his scenes, as he manages to offend both sides of the civility/political correctness debate deliberately and simultaneously, something that appears to be a common aspect of the author’s work.  And by ending the novel in some revived slave quarters, the author provides an unsettling look at what would happen if loony leftists got their way.

What sort of love does one expect to find in the ruins of American society?  The answer that this book is not really an enjoyable one.  Whether one faces the horrors of race warfare, or the rise of technological sexual stimulation (something this book eerily foretells), or one is faced with a great many unsatisfying polarities in life, love seems hard to find here.  Even a bad Catholic as the author is should be aware of the fact that a great deal of the love that is spoken here fails completely to reach even the lower levels of what should be used by the term.  There is fornication and adultery here, to be sure, but precious little genuine friendship or a great deal of concern for others.  The characters are laughable, to be sure, but not really admirable, and if the novel itself is not terrible it is not hard to understand why the author’s somewhat graphic discussions of behavior as well as his deeply unsettling racial language would make this book a bit embarrassing for many readers, too immoral to be supported by traditionalists and too awkwardly racial to be appreciated by the woke.  And so the book has been forgotten by both, even as America nears the ruins the author speaks of.