Books: Guidebook for Lost Pilgrims

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THE LAST GENTLEMAN by Walker Percy. 409 pages. Farrar, Straus & G/Voux. $5.95.

The Moviegoer, it seems, has a brilliant kid brother. Walker Percy's first novel, which won the National Book Award in 1962, tells the story of a likable young New Orleans stockbroker who escapes the meaninglessness of modern life by going to the movies. The Last Gentleman, his second novel, tells the story of a likable young Mississippian who escapes the meaninglessness of modern life by falling into fits of amnesia and daydreams. Like the earlier book, Gentleman recounts an anti-hero's battle against involvement. But it is sturdier in substance, more supple in style than The Moviegoer, and it shimmers even more brightly with the chaste and civilized ornaments of irony, understatement and compassion.

Woes & Wiles. Williston Bibb Barrett is an oversubtle Southerner who has lost the gift for action and adopted instead the stance of watcher, listener and wanderer. During his junior year at Princeton, he is overwhelmed by the mindless undergraduate decorum of the place and flees to New York, a room at the Y, and five years of psychoanalysis. Nights, he works three levels below ground as a humidification engineer for Macy's. Days, he plays up in Central Park at putting reality into perspective. He sets up a telescope and peeps at the passing show from behind a screen of greenery. What he sees on a distant park bench eventually lures him out back to where the action is. "It was not so much her good looks, her smooth-brushed brow and firm round neck bowed so that two or three vertebrae surfaced in the soft flesh, as a certain bemused and dry-eyed expression in which he seemed to recognize —himself! She was his better half."

He tracks her down—or rather up—to a hospital in Washington Heights, discovers she belongs to a cheerful, go-getting family of fellow Southerners, signs on as companion to her 16-year-old brother Jamie, who is ill with leukemia, and swings off with the family on a southbound safari that is taking the patient home to die.

The book's slight remaining plot teases the reader into wondering not "What will happen next?" but "What is really happening now?" What is happening is that Percy is using his plot as a witty excuse for exploring the wilder woes and wiles of Southern Negro servants, Northern liberal busybodies, professional religionists, disenchanted humanists ("Being geniuses of the orgasm is far more demanding than Calvinism"), and, most entertainingly of all, the subtle differences in outlook between the North and South.