Percy's devil [Immelmann] is a modern avatar of the Faust and Don Juan myths so prominently alluded to in Love in the Ruins, but the details of Immelmann's appearance and method also owe much to the devil in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a book which helped lead Percy into a systematic study of Existentialism. The ideas and terms that Percy borrows from Existential novelists like Dostoyevsky and Sartre and from the philosophers Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Marcel give his fiction an interesting allusiveness and, at times, a real philosophical depth…. While Love in the Ruins is the work of a ranging intellect and observant eye, I think it is the least successful of Percy's four novels. Its weakness is a disturbing incongruity between intelligence and imagination…. I call this essay "Walker Percy's Devil" because Art Immelmann represents both Percy's philosophical allusiveness and the aesthetic inconsistency of the novel. Immelmann's...