Though Walker Percy has always been a critic of how twentieth-century Americans live, and though The Second Coming, his fifth novel, continues this critique, this new work attempts in much greater detail than before to accentuate the positive: to explore, with great imaginative joy, states in which human beings may live together with authenticity. The Second Coming especially harkens back to and develops those scenes in Percy's previous work where authentic, human community occurs: a few conversations between Binx Bolling and Kate Cutrer in The Moviegoer (1961); the fleeting gesture of solidarity between Will Barrett and Sutter Vaught at the end of The Last Gentleman (1966); the epilogue to Love in the Ruins (1971), in which Tom More enjoys a family Christmas; and the mad-house visions of a peaceful life in the Shenandoah Valley of Lance Lamar in Lancelot (1977). The Second Coming continues the troubled life of Will Barrett; it explores...