Ghosts, Gentlemen, and the Art of Falling Apart

If you’re confused by the number you missed a few announcements. The blog is now posting on Tuesdays and Fridays. At the end of each post the books will be listed through the upcoming few weeks. Yes, I’ve gone from foolish assuming you’ll still want to read each book after I discuss it to maybe even wanting to read it to be prepared for your own take on my thoughts. Oh, the horror (this is the horror film fan response used regarding instead of using the more well known you know what happens when you assume something.) I also am adding a suggested title in case you enjoyed a particular post and and are interested in reading further into the author.

We’ve finally crawled out of Comala. After wandering through Juan Rulfo’s graveyard of voices—the dead whispering, the living barely louder—I thought we’d earned a break. A little sunlight. A little levity. Maybe even a book where someone isn’t doomed from page one.

But, well… I lied. Sort of. (But we’ll keep this one shorter. Shorter with two books. That’s a fair trade, right?)

Apparently, my subconscious had other plans. Instead of choosing something bright and cheerful, I reached for Walker Percy—a man constitutionally incapable of writing about anyone who isn’t “spiritually concussed”. Somehow, without meaning to, I picked two books that slide perfectly into the arc we just finished. We left behind ghosts who wanted to be heard, only to arrive with a man who moves through the world like he doesn’t even know he’s alive. Fun times had by all.

Welcome to the next arc: Identity, Collapse, Absurdity, and that strange clarity that comes when the self finally cracks.

This time, we’re following Will Barrett—first in The Last Gentleman, where he drifts through life like a polite apparition, and then in The Second Coming, where that drift becomes a full-scale psychiatric nosedive. If Pedro Páramo was about the dead refusing to stay silent, Percy gives us the opposite: a man who can’t quite hear himself.

And yes, this arc will be darker in places. But it will also at times be funnier. Even Percy is a master of the absurd; he gives us permission to laugh again. We need that desperately—to laugh at the shadows when we see the flash. Think of this as the season where the critics say the show finally remembers it’s allowed to have jokes after a few episodes that were “powerful” but deeply exhausting.

So let’s step out of Comala, shake the dust off our shoes, and follow Will Barrett into the next landscape—one where ghosts aren’t dead, identity is as Paul Simon says “slip-slidin’ away,” and sometimes the only way forward is through a complete and total collapse.

Part One: The Drifting Ghost

What makes The Last Gentleman so quietly devastating is that Will Barrett doesn’t just move like a ghost—he relates like one. His relationships aren’t connections so much as they are collisions. He drifts into people’s lives the way fog drifts into a room: present, aimless, without intention, without shape, and without the ability to grasp or hold onto anything.

His interactions with the Vaught family are the clearest example. They adopt him emotionally before he ever decides to be adopted. They project meaning onto him because he doesn’t have any for himself. Will becomes a blank surface onto which other people write their needs, their grief, and their expectations. Because he doesn’t know who he is, he simply lets them.

That’s the tragedy of Will Barrett: He is a man who becomes whatever the room requires.

• Not out of manipulation.

• Not out of deceit.

• But because he has no internal anchor.

As we learned from Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, an anchor isn’t just a weight; it’s a requirement. It keeps you tethered and attached to the world. Without it, you simply float away.

His romance with Kitty Vaught is just another version of this pattern. It’s not even a love story in the sense that we usually understand it—it’s a ghost story. Will doesn’t fall in love; he drifts into it. He’s drawn to her because she possesses a solidity he lacks. She knows who she is, even when she’s wrong. Will doesn’t know who he is, even in the moments when he’s right.

Percy writes him with this eerie, floating quality—a man who is always slightly out of phase with his own life. He is simply completely uninhabited as a person. He’s not a ghost because he died. He’s a ghost because he’s never fully arrived.

Part Two: The Freefall

Where The Last Gentleman is drifting, The Second Coming is a freefall.

In this stage of the journey, Will Barrett’s relationships aren’t just collisions—they are implosions. His marriage, his faith, and his sense of purpose have all dissolved. Even his body betrays him, with neurological episodes that blur the line between physical illness and a total psychological collapse.

And then there’s Allison.

Allison is the key to this deeper dive because she is the mirror Will didn’t know he needed. She isn’t a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”—she isn’t there to save him. She is a young woman who has survived her own psychiatric trauma, escaped an institution, and is attempting to rebuild a self from the ground up. She is what Will might become if he survives his own collapse. She represents the possibility of clarity on the other side of a breakdown.

Their relationship is a moment of vivid recognition. They are two people who have fallen through the floor of their own identities and crashed into the same basement.

Will’s descent into the cave—an actual, literal cave—is one of the most striking metaphors for psychiatric collapse in American fiction. It is a mind turning itself inside out. This connects perfectly to the “Well” scenes in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Whether it’s a well in Japan or a cave in the American South, the message is the same: When the self collapses, the world becomes a map of that collapse.

Percy’s use of the absurd isn’t just comic relief. It’s the reality of how the world looks when your mind is “frying”. Everything becomes too sharp, too strange, and simultaneously meaningful and meaningless.

Yet, this is where the hope lives. Will Barrett’s collapse finally forces him to confront the question he’s been avoiding for decades: Who am I when no one is looking? For Will Barrett, the answer isn’t pretty, but it is real. That is why The Second Coming ultimately feels more hopeful than The Last Gentleman.

Collapse becomes clarity. Absurdity becomes survival. Connection becomes possible.

And with that there’s hope. Only a tiny bit. But sometimes, that’s just enough.

Closing: Where We’re Headed Next (And why I’m still reading books about people falling apart—and you are, too. You’re still here, aren’t you? Hello?)

So, that’s where we’re leaving Will Barrett for now: halfway between a ghost, a gentleman, and a man who has finally realized that the floor beneath him is not, in fact, load-bearing. If The Last Gentleman was a gentle nudge toward existential confusion, The Second Coming is a shove down the stairs—but in a way that somehow leaves you feeling hopeful. About the possible.

Now that we’ve officially entered the “Psychiatric Arc,” things are only going to get stranger, darker, and—mercifully—funnier. If I’ve learned anything from literature, from life, and from the more than occasional visits (um, yeah, that’s an s) to the psych ward, it’s that the universe has a terrible sense of humor. The only winning move is to laugh first.

That’s why you’re here with me: to help me laugh at the shadows while we look for the flash.

The Upcoming Tuesday/Friday Schedule:

• Tuesday, May 12: Ten Days in a Mad-House (Nellie Bly)

• Friday, May 15: The Snake Pit (Mary Jane Ward)

• Tuesday, May 19: Shutter Island (Dennis Lehane)

• Friday, May 22: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)

• Tuesday, May 26: Faces in the Water (Janet Frame)

• Friday, May 29: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Joanne Greenberg)

• Tuesday, June 2: Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor)

• Friday, June 5: The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

• Tuesday, June 9: Darkness Visible (William Styron)

More Walker Percy?: Try his debut novel The Moviegoer.

ONWARD