In honor of the 250th anniversary of the frayed republic, I re-read Percy’s most prophetic novel since it is set on the Fourth of July. It’s aged, poorly, repeating the prejudices of the narrator. It’s aged, brilliantly, mapping the present fault lines of the country. Percy is, like his protagonist, a shaggy doctor of the soul who nails the diagnosis. Page after page, I marked lines which have proved prophetic. “The center did not hold. However, the Gross National Product continues to rise. There are Left states and Knothead states, Left towns and Knothead towns, but no center towns. … Left networks and Knothead networks, Left movies and Knothead movies. … Conservatives have begun to fall victim to unreasonable rages, delusions of conspiracies, high blood pressure, and large bowel complaints. Liberals are more apt to contract sexual impotence, morning terror, and a feeling of abstraction from this, of the self from itself.” Fiction writing as fortune-telling.