ABSTRACT
Walker Percy’s Lancelot has been sharply criticized as an inept novel, but it should be seen as a contemporary romance. 1 As Flannery O’Connor says in “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” “Hawthorne knew his own problems and perhaps anticipated ours when he said he did not write novels, he wrote romances. Today many readers and critics have set up for the novel a kind of orthodoxy. They demand a realism of fact which may, in the end, limit rather than broaden the novel’s scope.” According to O’Connor, the writer’s “true country” is “what is eternal and absolute,” which she insists “covers considerable territory.” 2 While Lancelot is not Percy’s best book, only reading it properly—as a romance—grants us entry to its true country.
