The Second Coming Author:Walker Percy From the dust jacket: "Walker Percy's new novel is the story of Will Barrett of Linwood, North Carolina, a widower, and how he finds his way out of death-in-life with the help of Allison, the girl in the greenhouse. Allie, having just engineered her own escape from a mental institution, is working hard to make a new life for herself and install ... more »a big, black iron Grand Crown stove in the run-down greenhouse when Will, in a most unusual manner, crosses her path. Her marvelous, slightly crazy speech patterns and Will's peculiar tendency from his 'petty mall' spells to fall down in strange places-golf courses, greenhouses, buses-astonishingly enought cement their relationship.
In one of the novel's central scenes, Will Barrett, 'like some crackpot preacher in California,' undertakes his own Pascalian wager. He leaves his comfortable home atop a pleasant Carolina mountain and descends deep into the bowels of the long-unused Lost Cove cave, 'looking for proof of the existence of God and a sign of the apocalypse.' He is prepared to wait for a sign, which may, of course, be death. What he is not prepared for is what happens...
Few writers treating themes of clinical depression, alienation, and delusion use humor and zaniess as effectively as (the writer)."« less