The Thanatos Syndrome

Summary: Dr. Thomas More has recently been released from two years of prison for selling prescription drugs and returns to his Louisiana community to discover that all is not right. 

The Thanatos Syndrome is sort of a sequel to Love in the Ruins, but apart from the characters, much has changed. Thomas More is still a somewhat neurotic psychiatrist. He has ‘found himself' after two years in jail and is no longer drinking to the extent that he was. He is now married to his former nurse/secretary/love interest from Love in the Ruins. But the world is very different. Love in the Ruins was in a sort of post-apocalyptic world where there was no real national government and many extremist groups that had created their own little fiefdoms. But Thanatos Syndrome is set in a late 1980s Louisiana (it was written about 15 years after Love in the Ruins) that is not too different from the real 1980s Louisiana.

Thomas More had one real significant research achievement the Lapseometer. In Love in the Ruins, it was designed to read the state of the soul with the ability to fix mental imbalances. In Thanatos Syndrome, it is a brain scanner that detects heavy salts in the brain that impact brain function. Soon after being released from prison, he is asked to consult with several patients. Most of these are people he has previously worked with and knows in this small community. They are changed. Over time Thomas More realizes that something is impacting a large area making people more docile, more computer-like in their ability to access information, and the women are more sexually aggressive. There is a crazy old catholic priest who was a boy during the early days of Nazi Germany that speaks up if the social commentary was not clear enough.

Walker Percy is writing a social commentary novel. The main theme of the book is social engineering. A group of rogue scientists and doctors are using the water system to nearly eliminate crime, teenage pregnancy, and other social ills, but also removing part of what it means to be human. Thomas More thinks that the human part is really important. Percy (and More) are Catholic and there is an underlying catholic social teaching that opposes abortion and euthanasia and eugenics as well as an obligation to care for AIDS patients and other ‘undesirables'. He critiques racism and sexism while illustrating it, so there are problems with me recommending it.

I really like Thomas More as a character. He is a soul doctor and even if curmudgeonly, he is likable. He embraces a number of his weaknesses and does not try to hide his struggles. One of the controversial parts of the book (spoiler) is that one of the doctors that are behind this unethical experiment is using the experiment to create a school for the purposes of child sexual exploitation. And other doctors are aware of his subproject, but they ignore it “for the greater good.” Many of the general comments about the book objected to it because they didn't see how that fit into the broader story. It is my assumption that Percy picked the sexual abuse of children as something that could pretty universally be condemned to show that social engineers tend to engineer society not for the common good, but for their own benefit. Like the last book, sex is more desired and talked about abstractly than it is illustrated in the pages. But this is not a book for kids.

Kids would not read it regardless because it is fairly slow and oriented around the ideas and social commentary more than the plot. I primarily listened to this as an audiobook with some occasional kindle reading. (The audiobook was part of the Audible free library, but it is leaving on Feb 22, which is what prompted me to pick it up.) The narration is good, but it is not a top-tier read. I am glad I read it, but I am still mixed on Walker Percy. My favorite of his books has been The Second Coming. Love in the Ruins and Thanatos Syndrome were odd by I am glad I read them. I have started The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman and gave up on both of them.