Love in the Ruins

The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

By: Walker Percy

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

The auto age is defunct. Buicks, Chryslers, and Pontiacs disfigure the landscape. Vines sprout in Manhattan. Wolves are seen in downtown Cleveland. And psychiatrist, mental hospital outpatient, and inventor Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument: the ontological lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind’s spiritual flu. But first, he must survive Moira, Lola, and Ellen - and discover why so many living people are actually dead.

Attempting to save the world from completely destroying itself, Tom ultimately begins to understand the quality and caprices of life and the uncontrollable vagaries of time and chance.

©1971 Walker Percy (P)2000 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"A comedy of love against a field of anarchy…. Percy is easily one of the finest writers we have." ( New York Times Book Review)

"A great adventure.… So outrageous and so real, one is left speechless." ( Chicago Sun Times)

"Immensely readable, vividly entertaining." ( Los Angeles Times)

good audiobook, some technical issues

good story, good performance. beginning of some words cut off. CD change instructions left in.

Bad Imitation of Catcher In The Rye

Hard to follow at most times and made little sense. Though it's parallels to today's world are eerily similar.

Great Book Ruined by Reader

Walker Percy was a masterful writer whose stories are as much philosophy as literature. Love in the Ruins was prophetic! Unfortunately, the reader ruined it. Not only did he mispronounce words unique to Louisiana, but also common English words. Lazy!

A telling novel for our times

An excellent book for so many reasons, mostly Percy's genius in demonstrating vast cultural concepts through very human and relatable characters, genius even more for the accuracy in which he foretold the current situation of our society.

Crazy

alot of details..I couldnt figure out the story for a few chapters..but then it was pretty good and funny too

great performance, good story.

the story is very interesting and it keeps you wondering what is going to happen.

a book for the trump era!

While we work we also watch and listen and wait. Let's put out fires today.

A crazy world and an irritating character

This novel has more of a story arc than others by Percy I have read, but nothing moves smoothly. It’s like a dream where one is planning to do something but can’t move forward. It seems that Tom More describes the same people and the same location several times in the course of this book and he never gets anywhere. It reflects the time in which it was written, 1970-71. There are hippies, a strange invention, revolutionaries, old bigots and racists, and lithe young girls from Texas. Tom has a pretty good set up except for the sniper who keeps trying to shoot him. The writing is entertaining and the dialogue is much like that found in his other books. No one seems quite right. Everyone is just a little off. I had to go at it in fits and starts, re-reading some parts just to make sure I got it. Probably wasn’t necessary, though, because it didn’t make all that much sense anyway. With Percy, you just go with the flow and have fun.

A course thread of God

Every time I read Walker Percy I fall in love. I seduce myself into thinking I'm actually just a bad Catholic and promise myself that next time I get a chance I will lose myself in the desert, the woods, or anywhere I can see the cold stars and the burning sand and live forever somewhere in between.

Reading another Percy novel is like discovering an unopened can of cashews in the cupboard. The amount of joy and delight I get from reading and laughing at Percy's absurd view of religion, life, love, the modern era, etc., is really only approached by a handful of lightly salted cashews and sex. 'Love in the Ruins' is messy and weird and probably could have been edited a bit, but it ALL still works perfectly for me. I laughed through every paragraph and each mark of punctuation. Percy's bad, crazy genius, almost polygamist, Catholic protagonists speak to me in ways that most philosophers (old and new), preachers (godly and godless), and politicians (left or right) fail to. He seems to occupy the ground of the fellow traveler who is just as lost and mistaken as you, but possesses a bit more whit and some extra whiskey.

So where does this novel stack up? It was like a friendly dystopian novel. It was like McCarthy decided to write a comic novel. The vines of his morality slide and creep through every page and his humor dances like a purple martin at dusk. The book might only be objectively a four star novel, but this is my review dammit and I own and carry my biases and I love Walker Percy because he makes me want to both believe AND misbehave.

Remarkable

It's a rare book that can be simultaneously light amd airy and also packed with philosophical observations and questions, and this one does it. This is a book for our times as it poke a wry finger into the eye of our current hyper partisan ugliness and makes it feel like there is much to laugh about there.