Books, Arts & Manners: Walker Percy, Big Deal

Walker Percy: A Life, by Patrick Samway, SJ (Farrar, Straus, 506 pp, $35)

ONE day some years ago, while working for Thought magazine (a religious journal published by Fordham University), I was instructed to typeset an article about some author named Walker Percy. As I set routinely about my task, a sense of horror came over me, and my fingers recoiled from these, the first words from a Percy novel I had ever read (or typed):