The Second Coming was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1980 and represents Walker Percy’s most ambitious attempt to resolve the questions that had driven his fiction from the beginning. It is the rare sequel that surpasses its predecessor — returning to Will Barrett from The Last Gentleman (1966) fourteen years later and finding him wealthy, retired, widowed, and profoundly sick of living. The novel that follows is simultaneously a love story, a theological experiment, and a comedy about the impossibility of being a sane person in an insane civilisation.
The Novel
Will Barrett is now in his fifties, living in a North Carolina country-club community called Linwood. His wife Marion has died, leaving him rich. He plays golf. He sits in his Mercedes. He falls down inexplicably — episodes that may be grand mal seizures or may be something else entirely. He has begun to suspect that ordinary life is a conspiracy of the trivially pleasant, designed to prevent anyone from asking the question that matters: Is God real or not?
Will devises an experiment. He will crawl into a cave in the Blue Ridge Mountains and wait. If God exists, God will save him. If God does not exist, Will dies, and the question is moot. It is the most literal-minded test of faith in American fiction — absurd, grandiose, and somehow completely serious.
Meanwhile, Allison Huger — a young woman recently escaped from a mental hospital — is living in an abandoned greenhouse near the cave’s exit. Allie has undergone so much electroshock therapy that her memory is fragmentary and her language is strange — she speaks in a kind of reinvented English, finding new words for things because the old ones have been erased. When Will emerges from the cave, half-dead, he falls (literally) into Allie’s greenhouse and her care.
The love story that develops between them is one of the most moving in American fiction — two broken people building a life together from scratch, without the accumulated debris of social convention.
Theological Architecture
Percy’s philosophical project reaches its culmination in The Second Coming. The novel dramatises what Percy called “the delta factor” — the uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought that both enables and alienates. Will’s problem is not depression in the clinical sense but what Kierkegaard called “despair” — the condition of a self that refuses to be itself.
The cave experiment is Percy’s answer to Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith.” Will refuses to leap blindly; he demands evidence. But Percy structures the novel so that the evidence arrives in a form Will could never have predicted — not as a divine revelation but as a human encounter, a young woman with strange speech and enormous practical capability who needs him as much as he needs her.
Allie represents a kind of pre-fallen consciousness — not because she is innocent (she has suffered enormously) but because her electroshocked memory has freed her from the accumulated despair of normal socialisation. She sees the world fresh. Her language, stripped of cliché, forces both Will and the reader to see familiar things as if for the first time.
Publication and Reception
The first edition was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, in 1980. First printings are identified by:
- FSG imprint on title page
- “First printing, 1980” stated on copyright page
- Price of $12.95 on dust jacket front flap
- Cloth binding in grey boards
The novel received Percy’s strongest reviews since The Moviegoer. Robert Towers in the New York Times Book Review called it “a beautiful novel, funny and touching and wise.” It was nominated for the American Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Critical Standing
The Second Coming is regarded by many Percy scholars as his masterpiece — more successful than The Moviegoer in integrating his philosophical concerns with fully realized characters and a compelling narrative. The love story between Will and Allie is often cited as one of the few convincing late romances in American literature, avoiding both sentimentality and ironic distance.
The novel’s exploration of religious faith is remarkably nuanced. Percy — a Catholic convert — neither endorses nor dismisses Will’s demand for proof. The novel suggests that God’s answer may come not as a supernatural event but as the ordinary miracle of human connection — a theology that satisfies neither fundamentalists nor atheists, which is precisely Percy’s point.
Collecting The Second Coming
First edition (FSG, 1980): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $100–$300. The novel had a healthy first printing, driven by Percy’s established reputation and the book’s prize nominations.
Signed copies are available, as Percy was more active in public events during the 1980s. Signed firsts bring $400–$1,000.
Advance Reading Copies exist and are collected, typically $100–$250.
UK first edition (Secker & Warburg, 1981): Less common, $75–$200.
The novel’s strong critical reputation and its status as a sequel to The Last Gentleman make it a reliable Percy collectible, though it commands somewhat less than The Moviegoer due to the latter’s National Book Award provenance.