Walker Percy. The Second Coming. New York: Farar, 1980. Print.

No, this is not an interpretation of Bible prophecies, this is a novel. I read it perhaps for the same reason that I read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. The Second Coming in some ways is a second coming of The Moviegoer. The main character is a prosperous man in the Southern United States who is at loose ends. At the end, there are a marriage and hints of a religious conversion taking place.

Will Barrett is a widower with an adult daughter. A Georgia native, he was a Wall Street lawyer and now lives in North Carolina. He plays a lot of golf and has occasional fainting episodes. He calls them petit mal epilepsy until they are diagnosed as an unusual hereditary syndrome.

Alternating scenes introduce us to Allison Huger, who has engineered an escape from a mental institution. She is the adult daughter of Kitty Vaught Huger, an old flame of Will’s. It seems that Allie may have been institutionalized by her parents to prevent her from taking an inheritance of valuable and mostly undeveloped land near Will’s country club.

At first, Will’s story is the less interesting of the two, except for his fainting episodes, which seem to mostly happen on the golf course. Being a well-off man in his fifties or sixties who plays golf and whose only child has become a born-again Christian, he sounds like he could be one of those boring Saul Bellow characters I mentioned previously—except for two things.

His own father at one time tried to kill him. Apparently, this may have been an unsuccessful attempt at murder-suicide because Will would witness his father’s suicide later. Partly because of those intense life events, Will does not believe in God. In a short time now he encounters a variety of religious believers—his daughter, some Episcopalians, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a new ager—so he decides to conduct an experiment to see if God really exists, and perhaps, as a corollary, whether or not God is good.

His test is to conceal himself in a cave and see whether he is rescued in time. The cave is actually a large underground cavern system part of which is under the golf course. This could be seen like Tom Sawyer’s cave adventure as being a parody of Christ’s resurrection, but Will Barrett is fairly serious about this.

Typical of Walker Percy, there is a lot of humor and some pointed and pity social commentary. (No lectures, just humorous asides.) Will does come to believe in God, not because of any special supernatural experience, but because it appears that God answers his questions/prayers in a way that may be surprising or unexpected, but in a way that only He could orchestrate.

The title suggests that Mr. Barrett has a second chance, that he in some way has been born again. But of course, the term Second Coming normally refers to Jesus return to earth “in glory to judge both the living and the dead” and “whose kingdom shall have no end,” to quote the Creed. Will’s born-again daughter believes we are living in the end times. Keep in mind this was published in 1980. The biggest selling book in the United States in the 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth.

One sign of the end times that is often noted in Jewish and Christian writings is the return of many Jews to Palestine and the re-establishment of a Jewish state. Will understands this and believes that it indeed may be a sign of the last days, but he says that he has not noticed any Jews leaving North Carolina yet. Still, he does see that God has not abandoned either him or the world, and that fact gives Will and the reader hope.