Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence by Jessica Hooten Wilson

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 263 from which English Catholics also often felt a complicated estrangement with a sense of not belonging at home due to Britain’s contested Protestant national identity. Focusing on Defoe’s Roxana, Carnes examines the social anxieties in identity, further exploring the diverse relations between England and the Catholic world. In the fourth chapter, through Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison Carnes analyses how Catholics represented themselves or indulged Protestant stereotypes, as in the chapter on Inchbald. Carnes’s book humanises the Catholic community, challenging English stereotypes and stressing how it grew in that century alongside engagement with the wider society and economy. Overall, Carnes examines how Catholics saw themselves, introducing a realistic and sympathetic representation focused not only on the politics of the plays, novels, or beliefs of the authors, but on religion and on Catholics thinking about themselves and their own struggles. Through the various experiences of the authors, Carnes explores how Catholics investigated their own identities, providing a compelling analysis of a century in which British society and identities were rethought, ultimately reminding us how this negotiation is still ongoing. Giada Pizzoni University of Exeter Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence Jessica Hooten Wilson Ohio State University Press, 2017. viii + 200 pp. $29.95 paperback. $89.95 hardcover. $29.95 ebook. Ever since Walker Percy published his first novel in 1961, literary critics have noted so many influences on Percy’s writing—the Bible, of course, especially the Book of Revelation, Augustine, Dante, Cervantes, Thomas More, Shakespeare, Descartes, Pascal, Hawthorne, Melville, Peirce, Tolstoy, Freud, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Marcel, Voegelin, Hopkins, Mann, Lawrence, Joyce, Greene, Sinclair Lewis, Raymond Chandler, Hemingway, Thomas Merton, as well as Southern writers from Poe and Twain to William Percy, Faulkner, Wolfe, Warren, and O’Connor—that readers may well wonder who has not influenced Percy. The search for influences seems especially appropriate to Percy’s fiction, for it frequently explores both the baleful and beneficial effects of imitating various cultural models in modern America, especially in the South. The identification of Percy’s literary Religion & Literature 264 sources began as early as Brainard Cheney’s review of The Moviegoer, which noted the formative role of Dostoevsky. Percy read Dostoevsky throughout his life, taught his works to college students, and talked about him in interviews . Although various critics have mentioned or explored the role of Dostoevsky in Percy’s fiction, no one has made the case for such inspiration so extensively as Jessica Hooten Wilson in Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence. Like one of Percy’s own characters, seekers all, Wilson pursues a search in her book. She begins by tracing how Percy first sought mentorship in the work of Thomas Wolfe and Thomas Mann, but their example led to Percy’s largely lifeless apprentice fiction, one novel that he destroyed and another that he never published. The aspiring novelist, who converted to Catholicism in 1947 after recovering from tuberculosis, could not learn from these masters how to combine his faith with his fiction. Although more attention to how Percy sought to rework The Magic Mountain into his unpublished The Gramercy Winner might have clarified why Mann was not as edifying as Dostoevsky, Wilson leaves no doubt that the Russian writer provided a vision and an understanding of voice that influenced Percy’s entire career. Dostoevsky’s focus on how the scientism, materialism, and nihilism of preRevolutionary Russia culminated in violence helped Percy to diagnose the contemporary ills of America. And the dialogism that Bakhtin celebrated in Dostoevsky’s fiction helped Percy to create, as Michael Kobre has shown in Walker Percy’s Voices, characters rather than mere ideologues. His searchers observe, exemplify, and expose the national malaise, for they contain within themselves multiple and sometimes competing forms of discourse. Dostoevsky thus enabled Percy to discover what Wilson calls his “incarnational realism” (50), a novelistic reverence for words and flesh, a horror at their degradation and abuse, and a faith in Jesus as embodied Logos. Wilson supports this central argument by showing how Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov shaped the plots, characters, themes, images, and...