One More Walker Percy

Percy only wrote a handful of books, so I'm trying to space out my reading of them so I don't run out of "first time" Percy reads. I plan to re-read some of them again, most notably The Moviegoer. I'm not so sure about this one, though I do strongly recommend it.

I had the happy coincidence in reading this book of picking back up with the narrator character from Love in the Ruins, an earlier Percy novel that I enjoyed for its straddling the boundaries between literary novel, Southern lit, and science fiction. That's a hard combination to pull off, but Percy has done it again in The Thanatos Syndrome. The narrator is several years older but his world isn't any better, and though his personal life has been for several years, it's coming apart again through some of the same old demons -- alcohol and the soulless science of the human body that is his profession. But what's being put into the water, and why would it have this curious effect on brain chemistry?

Wouldn't YOU like to know! (Said in my best 6th-grade-oral-book-report tone.)

I didn't really get The Moviegoer the first time through, which is why I need to read it again. I think I get at least the basic message of this novel, though -- science and the necessity of the possible have eaten away our souls, and even the heroes who would fight back are nearly engulfed in the emptiness themselves.