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In The Second Coming Lewis Peckham studied literature and Fromm because he "thought books could tell him how to live," and Allie obliged her former boyfriend by studying a sex manual because she thought that it could teach her how to love. He hopes that his lapsometer will heal the rift between the transcendence of his dead wife who read ESP and the New Spirituality and the carnality of his empty-headed mistress who reads Helen Gurley Brown's "Adultery for Adults," lost in her copy of Cosmopolitan.

Tom More, the angelic/bestial psychiatrist in Love in the Ruins, invents the ultimate self-help device to solve Will's dilemma.

He finds new guidance about loving and living in Sutter Vaught's casebook of autopsies that reveals how even sex and pornography cannot help the lost self reenter the everyday earth from its orbit of scientific abstraction. The courteous engineer tries to sublimate his concupiscence by reading two pages of Living, a collection of optimistic maxims that teach him how to become a disciple of Dale Carnegie. When the young Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman spies Rita Vaught with a copy of The Art of Loving, he recalls that he felt elated while reading Fromm's book, but afterwards it did not change his life. Bob Dean, the amorous sex researchers whom Binx remembers jesting like show people before they autographed copies of Technique in Marriage. However, the failed lovemaking of Binx and Kate on the train to Chicago forces them to confront only the despair of their set frailty, for they cannot play the roles of Dr. Merle's book promises a psychological version of this same mystical goal by encouraging Kate Cutrer to live joyfully and creatively as herself. In The Moviegoer Binx notices that Mercer, his aunt's affected majordomo, has been reading a Rosicrucian volume, How to Harness Your Set Powers. Always on a journey, often literally on the road, his wayfarers consult such Baedekers for the saving therapies and salutary techniques that will make them feel less lost. The wanderers in Walker Percy's fictional Cosmos have long sought to find a place in their world through the bibles of self-help books.