Rolling Stone Magazine, July 21, 1983
Walker Percy, one of our best novelists, has taken a sharp turn for the abstract with Lost in the Cosmos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux $14.95). Subtitled The Last Self Help Book, it proves that fiction is stronger than nonfiction; or, as Percy writes: "Through art, the predicament of self becomes not only speakable but laughable."
Which brings us to The Book of the SubGenius (McGraw-Hill, $9.95). A kind of New Wave Revelations -- as if the Holy Scriptures, like the words of the prophets, were written on the back of matchbook covers and the labels of Dr. Bronner's liquid soa -- this pastiche of advertising art and arch arcana is for those who can "laugh at the fact that nothing is funny anymore."