Percy's "emotional comprehension" of women

Simcha Fisher recently wrote that she "received terrible lessons" about romantic love when she read Walker Percy's "terrific" books as a teenager:

[They] were just above my emotional comprehension (and I worry a bit about Percy’s own emotional comprehension of women). The romantic escapades of Dr. Thomas More are his tragic flaw, and a symptom of his deeper, similarly flawed relationship with Christ, which comes in cycles of ecstatic lust and regret. But a teenager will likely take any likable character as a role model, ignoring or normalizing the misery and distress that the character suffers.

As Matthew Lickona comments, Percy is a diagnostic novelist who is more interested in depicting whether and how his characters get "through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon" than in giving them the sort of emotional range that would make them adequate role models. The reader can relate to the diagnosis of malaise and the initial prescription of the capacity for lust (these are, in my opinion, the moments when Percy reaches a genuinely artistic description), but not to much more than that. Some men sit like Achilles or run through swamps; even more women balance a Coke like Sharon Kinkaid or drive like Margot. When it cuts through the malaise, "romantic love" is like whiskey rather than water. Its surprising heaviness and sweetness is nearer the thigh than the face (the locus of "emotional comprehension"). And that is not nothing. But it does reveal, as Lickona also says, the limits of the diagnostic aim: "One of the difficulties of writing a diagnostic novel is that you have to people it with other . . . people." Dr. Thomas More really is as boring as his confessor says he is toward the end of Love in the Ruins: "Meanwhile, forgive me but there are other things we must think about . . . things which, please forgive me, sometimes seem more important than dwelling on a few middle-aged daydreams" (399). And Binx and Kate are no Jack and Anne and certainly no Elizabeth and Darcy.

Anyway, the Korrektiv discussion of Mrs. Fisher's post includes this comment:

Next: a post on Kierkegaard and women. I love SK, but it’s gonna make Percy look like Oprah.

Funny. The Kierkegaard of Works of Love and Myshkin were my teenage models for comprehending women and articulating romantic love. Whoops. Failing to live up to that wasn't anything you could call graceful. But I think Kierkegaard was more imaginative about women than the odd pseudonymous text would suggest. As he wrote in his Journal: "Had I had faith, I would have stayed with Regine. Thanks be to God, I can see that now. During those days I came close to losing my senses."