About two thirds of the way through The Moviegoer, Walker Percy's narrator is reflecting on how certain encounters are supposed to work, according to fiction:
Or--do what a hero in a novel would do: he too is a seeker and a pilgrim of sorts and he is just in from Guanajato or Sambuco where he has found the Real Right Thing, or from the East where he apprenticed himself to a wise man and because proficient in the seventh path to the seventh happiness. Yet he does not disdain this world either and when it happens that a maid comes to his bed with a heart full of longing for him, he puts down his book in a good and cheerful spirit and givers her as merry a time as she could possibly wish for. Whereupon, with her dispatched into as sweet a sleep as ever Scarlett enjoyed the morning of Rhett's return, he takes up his book again and is in an instant ten miles high and on the way.
(The movie version. which precedes this, was necessarily tamer sixty-odd years ago.)
Some days ago, in the course of clearance reading, I happened to pick up The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham, which in a couple of chapters matches Percy's description well. The Razor's Edge was published in 1944, The Moviegoer in 1961. In the intervening years, I imagine that a lot of lesser writers drew on Maugham.
