John F. Desmond is the author of Gravity and Grace: Seamus Heaney and the Force of Light; Flannery O'Connor's Vision of History; At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy, and Walker Percy's Search for Community.
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"This major work boldly analyzes how each novelist charted the perverse self-destructiveness of the modern world and posited a life-affirming alternative in the possibility of Christian salvation."--Gary Ciuba, author of Walker Percy: Books of Revelation"An early critic of Walker Percy's work called Percy 'The Dostoevsky of the Bayou.' Forays into the links between Percy's works and the great Russian exist, but none as substantive as John Desmond's Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide. Beset by suicide in his family history, Percy's work can be understood as an attempt to trace the cultural and spiritual absence that make suicide a grim (and everyday) part of the late nineteenth century through our present age. In this effort Dostoevsky serves as Percy's Virgil. Dostoevsky saw in his time the malaise that follows the ascension of the autonomous self, now running rampant in the early twenty-first century. Suicide reveals the spiritual maladies that beset this age, and while the social sciences claim sovereignty over it, Percy, like Dostoevsky, sees suicide as standing beyond whatever social science might provide as a 'cure.' The issue, one could say, is ontological, and attempts at social programs to 'fix it' could paradoxically worsen it. Desmond's lucid analysis underscores the deeper philosophical and spiritual realities that our culture resists. This is a book to be reckoned with."--Edward J. Dupuy, author of Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery, and Redemption