Review: Walker Percy's "Lost in the Cosmos"

Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one: John Calvin, a Confederate artillerist, and a space alien walk onto the set of The Phil Donahue Show. This setup is the most pointed, most hilarious image offered in Walker Percy’s 1983 meta-satire Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, but not by a significant margin. In the process of making fun of pop psychology and the kind of people who worry about what they’ve read in pop psychology books, Percy discusses sexually erratic psychologists, lesbian astronauts, and the horror of being buried alive during a cocktail party—all of it a lead-up to the “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style doomsday scenario that finishes the book. 

After a month of mulling it over, I think I liked this book, but it’s so unabashedly strange that reading it can’t quite be called pleasant. It’s a satire of self-help books, yes, but also a frank, even brutal, examination of the questions of self and identity that plague the modern American. (I think.) Full of quizzes and thought experiments, the book has the interactive format of a standard self-help text, but the questions are bizarre and dense, while the thought experiments are often disturbing or unanswerable (i.e. “Explain why Moses was tongue-tied and stage-struck before his fellow Jews but had no trouble talking to God.”) This isn’t the most intriguing or alarming opportunity for self-examination in the book by a long shot, but it’s one of the few short enough to excerpt. 

Percy’s general point is that modern Americans are obsessed with themselves in a particular way. They are fixated on “the self” as a concept; and this isn’t very healthy. This strikes me as a particularly Southern attitude—“Honey, you’d feel so much better if you just wouldn’t dwell on things so much and spent more time thinking of others.” It also strikes me as a convenient framing device for a book composed largely of wandering thoughts and digressions: everything can be about “the self” if you try. Walker Percy is a good enough writer to pull it off, but in other hands, it’s easy to imagine the book being a formless mess.

Percy zings a number of sacred cows, including those perennial targets “writers” and “the honor of the South,” and includes some of the best lines of his career; but these peppery one-liners are embedded in a substrate of self-consciously thought-provoking philosophy. (He even uses the word “semiotics.”) Percy wants to joke about introspection, but he also wants to genuinely discuss how we know and understand ourselves—with uneven results. He makes some good points, but there’s an undercurrent of freshman-dorm-room “Man, how do we know we even exist? Say, pass that…” A book designed to really make me think about what it all means usually tempts me to just drink beer in front of the TV, but more patient or introspective readers will enjoy Percy’s aims more. 

That said, I’ve never dog-eared more pages of a book. There’s something quotable on nearly every page: “Why is it no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep,” or “…for every Mother Teresa, there seem to be 1,800 nutty American nuns, female Clint Eastwoods who…are out to get the Pope.” It also has an entire section titled “Why Writers Drink,” which I xeroxed and mailed to the Country Roads office in partial explanation of why this column was late.

There’s also a lot of sex. Percy seems disturbed and amused by the increasing prevalence and availability of sex and sexually oriented entertainment—and frankly, he’s got a point—but his repeated discussions of what sex means in this context and that context and the other context grow repetitive. Reading Walker Percy on sex is like hearing your grandmother swear: startling, both because of the source and the old-fashioned phrasing involved. This is also one of the few topics that really dates Lost in the Cosmos: a sexy astronaut is described as a “Shirley MacLaine type,” which meant something else before her hippie self-reinvention; and AIDS is referred to as “homosexual ‘aids’ diseases.” If future editions update these few little giveaways, the book has a chance to be really evergreen—mocking the self-involved never gets old.

How to sum up a book like this? Strange and thoughtful, Lost in the Cosmos is worth your time. It reveals Percy’s interesting blend of dual intelligences: playful, fun-with-words-and-images cleverness, and deeper, tangle-with-eternal-truths ponderousness. It’s also instructive to see what one of the great literary minds of recent history does when he becomes old and prestigious enough not to have to answer to anybody. We should all get to have as much fun.