by Walker Percy
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| List Price: | $15.00 |
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| Lowest New Price: | $10.27 |
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Product Description
Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 An all-time favorite, 2007-05-12
Like a good doctor, Percy distracts you with charm or by saying something funny and then sticks you with a shot of the truth while you're off-guard. There are a lot of truths in this zany book that features a lot of Percy's wry humor, perhaps the most important being that the hypersexualization of our society is the product (or perhaps cause) of the deadening of our souls. You'll like the protaganist, Dr. Tom More, enough to want to read the sequel "The Thanatos Syndrome." Finally, if you Google "Ralph Wood Love in the Ruins" you'll find an English professor's insightful notes on this book. They draw out some meaning that I'd missed. I usually don't read books twice but I had seconds on this one.
1 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
 Great reading? Are you kidding me?, 2007-05-04
Who could possibly claim the following sentence (which DOES occur in this novel) is in any way good, or that it was written by an author with even a shred of skill?: "High though he was getting, Chuck, what with his three years at M.I.T. and his 800 SAT score, is digging me utterly."
Flannery O'Connor, in a letter to one of her friends, wrote of Thomas Wolfe that anyone who admired his novels liked good fiction only by accident. The same holds true for Walker Percy.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The End Is Near, 2007-04-23
What do you do when the world is coming to an end right before your very eyes, but no one seems to believe you? That is the concept facing Dr. Thomas More, distant relation to the famous/infamous Saint Thomas More, in Walker Percy's novel "Love In The Ruins". The United States is at a time of crisis, but few seem to understand the implications of the events unfolding around them. It is up to Dr. More, who knows how to diagnose the problem, but not necessarily treat it, to try to prevent the chaos from happening.
The story begins on a hot fourth of July, with Doc staking out the abandoned Howard Johnsons motel in town. In three separate rooms he has cocooned his three paramours and he is waiting for an event that he knows is going to happen; an event that could very possibly bring about the end of the world. The novel then shifts back in time to the three previous days, tracing Doc's journey that led him to seek refuge at the motel. The reader learns that he has created a Ontological Lapsometer, a sort of "stethoscope of the human spirit", through which he can diagnose exactly what ails a person's soul, and finally discovers how to treat it. Meanwhile, there is a revolution brewing; the Bantus and love children are ready to take over what the white man has destroyed, if a major catastrophe doesn't befall everyone before that can happen.
"Love In The Ruins" is a truly southern novel, crafted through Percy's intelligence and tempered with the same absurdity that is a trademark of great southern writers such as Percy and Flannery O'Connor. The reader must suspend disbelief as to the events unfolding, even though they are frighteningly realistic, and not so far-fetched in this present day. Percy's hero Doc More is an antihero on par with those of Hemingway; flawed, prone to drink, forever chasing after women who are wrong for him. This novel is his coming-of-age, in a sense, because Doc learns what it is he wants out of life, and how to best achieve that. Subtitled "The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World", "Love In The Ruins" is a deliciously funny and poignant look at a near-apocalyptic America.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 Saying a little bit in a glorious way, 2007-01-10
Walker Percy was a little too much of a child of post-WWII America, taking himself, his Catholicism, the South, and Manifest Destiny entirely too seriously. That being said, he was a gifted author, and "Love in the Ruins" showcases his keen powers of observation, a Chestertonian ability to wonder at triviality, and an incisive wit.
I cannot help but compare Percy to John Barth. Love in the Ruins bears similarity to Giles Goat-Boy in the sense that both are thoroughly informed by the temporal abortion of the 1960's. But where Barth never emerged from his cocoon of depravity, Percy walks the same ground and retains a vestigal morality. Though the majority of Love in the Ruins is a dystopic fantasy, Percy is able to communicate real and heartrending emotion through Dr. Tom More's periodic memories of his daughter. Outside of this one thread (never fully developed) Percy's work is synthetic: brilliant, but inhuman.
There is an interesting bit of commentary on the Catholic Church as seen through the lens of post Vatican II confusion, and it is hard not to see a parallel between the three "loves" of Dr. More and the three pieces of the splintered Catholic Church. Whereas Percy invents a schism in which the American Catholic Church, the Dutch Schismatics, and the Roman Catholic Church compete with varying effectiveness for the Catholic population, so do Lola, Moira, and Ellen lay different claims to More's ultimate allegience. Lola, like the (Tridentine) American Catholic Church, is big, graceless, but a talented classical cellist. Commitment to Lola would bring More into the goodwill of society and offer a comfortable life in the presence of a hollow classicism. Moira, like the Dutch Schismatics, is shallow, sexual and effortless; offering little but expecting nothing. Ellen, like the Roman Church, is demanding, presumptuous, somewhat naive, but salvific.
Love in the Ruins is a novel of tensions, with the protaganist held in a sort of self-imposed exile in the midst of those tensions: neither Knothead or Leftist, scientist or layman, AmChurch or Roman. The novel concerns the inflection points associated with the inability to sustain these tensions. Percy paints man as a being with a deep rift in his nature, paved with a thin veneer that disguises the self divorced from itself. And, being a novel concerned ultimately with God, Percy paints a tantalizing picture: his image of man forsaken of himself gives a clue to the fullness of the human condition expressed as God forsaken of God in the cry: "Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?"
While taken as a whole, the ending is not satisfying in the Dickensian sense, Love in the Ruins is not a morbid novel. Nor is it a progressive novel. Adherents of Call to Action and modern Amchurch afficianados will find an unstable ally in Percy, for his soteriology is as fully developed as his catechism. Percy, through Dr. More, emerges from the fog of zeitgeist intact, which is much more than can be said of most of his generation.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Morality and Honor in a Declining Culture, 2006-07-15
Walker Percy was a shrewd observer of culture: locally in the South of his birth, more broadly in the western world of the late 20th century. The author's pessimism speaks broadly of decline and loss; yet in the midst of it all, his protagonist clings to hope. Why? Rather than resolving our questions, this book raises them in tribute and salute. This book will linger in your awareness.
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