Love in the Ruins is a weird damned book

The 1960s must have done a number on Walker Percy for him to publish Love in the Ruins in 1971. That could be the whole post, but I’m going to call out a few details at my discretion.

Satire

Because he’s writing satire, Percy can be difficult to write about. There’s a protean quality: he shifts like a wrestler and doesn’t easily let you get a handle on him. It can be hard to dismiss him because his novels can be like improvised explosive devices filled with barbed fishhooks that stick with you for weeks after reading.

The fishhooks that stick out to me are the social divisions he lays out. Politically, there are knotheads and the LEFT. The knotheads abandon the name Christian Conservative Constitutional Party as being too reminiscent of the Russian communist CCCP. The LEFT is short for LEFTPAPASANE (which stands for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia (17-18). With the knotheads, the funny thing in the current context is how closely Christian nationalists link up with Russia. With the LEFT, what’s funny is how liberals continue to build coalitions, resulting in constantly growing acronyms.

The Catholics are in schism. There are 3 branches: the American Catholic Church which embraces “property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods” (i.e. promoting the white status quo and opposing racial integration), the Dutch schismatics who are liberal, and the remnant Roman Catholics whose only priest has to work at a watch tower to pay the bills (5-6).

The center of all of this would be the Rotary Club, with its creed: “Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendship?” (132). But their banner is torn and abandoned. This last is the worst for me as a reader because when I would complain about how unfair Percy is being, these phrases come back to mock me.

Bad sci-fi

And by bad, I mean terrible. There’s this half-hearted attempt to bring in things like cupid’s quiver (female condom) and answer-phones (a kind of cell phone), but really everything just feels like 1969 or 1970 but someone dropped gadgets in, as if there were an old-West ghost town with electric lights.

Racism

Beyond a paternalistic white attitude toward Black people, there’s a proliferation of Asian slurs. Considering that the point of view of the novel is that of a white Southerner, this should not be entirely surprising but it is jarring. There’s a weird thing that goes on with the character thinking a Black man looks Chinese, but then also sees himself that way (88, 96, 296). It’s weird, like that time I read a UK-edition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and had to read the word kerb over and over.

Life is weirder than satirical sci-fi

A big focus of the book is the Love Clinic, staffed by Fr. Kev Kevin, and ex-priest and reader of the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal. Having thrown in with the Dutch Schismatics, “who believe in relevance, but not God” (6), Fr. Kevin is studying the orgasm. I find the caricature of Fr. Kevin to be pretty unfair, having grown up in the Midwest with no shortage of liberal priests, and who on the whole were not this ridiculous. And the ones who left the priesthood generally became happily married. I wonder if Percy ever was surprised by John Paul II’s theology of the body sermons (1979-1984), which talked about things like mutual orgasm and the value of pleasure in sex. This focus came not from a liberal like Andrew Greely (who remained an unmarried priest his whole life), but instead a Polish survivor of the Soviet Union.

With the sexual abuse revelations, It turned out that liberalism (or Americanism) wasn’t as great a threat to Catholicism as clericalism. There were and are plenty of bishops, both conservative and liberal who were more interested in protecting the church from losing its reputation than in protecting children. It is important to realize in this that it is taking a dedicated effort of victims, journalists, and lawyers to get the church to reform.

Like I said, Love in the Ruins is a weird book.