The Moviegoer (edition 1998)

Some keen observations of human traits and behaviors here. Particularly of people with depression and bipolar disorder, which affect the two main characters.

Jack Bolling is a thirty year old commodities trader in New Orleans who has found a niche to occupy, but has no real ambitions other than to go to movies and dally with a succession of secretaries. But underneath all that, he feels he's on a search for meaning that can't be answered by the brand of patrician conservatism espoused by his Aunt Emily. One constant in his life is his cousin, Kate Cutrer, a bright, witty woman who is subject to debilitating mood swings.

Question, how come when cousins marry in the poor classes, we laugh and cue the banjo music, but when rich people do it, it's all proper and preserves the bloodline, old chaps?

I liked it, though. It reminded me of [bc:The Sun Also Rises|3876|The Sun Also Rises|Ernest Hemingway|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165367268s/3876.jpg|589497] in many ways. Not that Percy is as terse as Hemingway, just that he gives the same sense to the daily living of life. But whereas with TSAR, Jake find a calm escape from the struggles of life on a fishing trip, Jack "Binx" Bolling finds one in an unintentional visit with family at a bayou fishing cabin. Even though the fishing element is common to both interludes, it is family, not nature (as in Hemingway) which provides the solace.

An internet friend said that she and her friends tried to parse the Catholic message and didn't have much luck. I didn't either. Although one clue might be in Camus's "The Plague", wherein a do-gooder atheist and a do-gooder Catholic meet and find a lot in common. I know Percy read and was influenced by the existentialists, including Camus. Maybe a further delving into his later novels will show better how his religion and his philosophy interact. ( )

I wasn't hating it, but I have to admit I'm not going to finish it.

(June 29)
Okay, I picked it up again on the strength of the bit about "This I Believe". We'll see how it goes.

(June 30)
I actually finished it! I liked it more than I thought I would, especially the part about "rotations". I was totally going to even go to book club and discuss it, but there was a whole situation (two, actually) and that just did not happen. Maybe next time. ( )

The Moviegoer is a coming-of-age story of a twenty-nine year old, 'Binx' Bolling, who works in a suburb of New Orleans at a brokerage firm. Binx doesn't know himself very well. Although he claims to enjoy the mediocrity of his life at the branch office in Gentilly, he at the same time fears the everyday-ness of life. His aunt believes him to have an analytical mind, whereas he believes he has never analyzed anything, meanwhile he continually analyzes himself and everyone else in this first-person narrative.
The most charming and at the same time disturbing aspect of this work is Binx's relationships to other women, because he proves to be a moody lover, and is unaware of what he wants. He admires his secretary's (Sharon) beauty, but while they embrace on the beach, he experiences the realization that he does not "love her so wildly as I loved her last night."
This might be a good book for teenagers, because of Binx's struggles with identity and the everyday aspects of life that he associates with malaise, despair, and deadness, but much of the book seems rather pointless. ( )

The book opens with a quote from Kierkegaard: “. . .the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” The preface warns us that when movie stars appear within the pages of the book, “it is not the person of the actor which is meant but the character he projects upon the screen.”

I’ve read two great New Orleans novels in my life: John Kennedy Tooles' "A Confederacy of Dunces" and Robert Hicks’ "A Separate Country" – two fabulous but couldn’t-be-more-different novels. Unfortunately, this one misses being the third.

In Walker's novel, Binx, a 29-year-old Korean War veteran, New Orleans native, and stock broker is alienated, feels disconnected, yearns in an amorphous way to live a life less ordinary. To this end he devises games that he feels lifts him out of significance. Searches, repetitions, and loops are his mind games for forcing himself to notice things, to create an imaginary matrix in which he can rise above the unnoticed drones, where he, in his mind, can count.

Kate is his female counterpart, who flirts with suicide to stimulate her interest in living. Two more self-absorbed characters would be hard to find. Yet, Percy writes about them in such as way that we become interested. Perhaps it is the final scene in the epilogue when Binx’s half brother dies that provides the excuse to find them sympathetic. It’s the only time we learn that either of them is capable of caring for someone other than themselves and to a lesser extent, each other.

That said, Walker is a damn good writer of existential fiction. The novel is somewhat dated and out of fashion but glad I read it for the marvelous voice of the author. ( )

This is one of those in which not much happens. The main character is a man works and goes to the movies and wanders around trying to fight off malaise and everydayness. He is "Seeking" he says, but it's never really clear what he's looking for (perhaps the opposite of everydayness?) or how he plans to find it. His main fear is turning into "a Nobody from Nowhere".

Reading the first few pages, I enjoyed the writing style, but as the story went on, I quickly found myself less and less interested. I even grew to dislike the main character as he continued to view the world from a distance. There's a subtle racism throughout, which can be explained, if not excused by the face that it's story centered around a Southern white man in the '50s, and incorporated with that is a general sense of people not as people, but the ideas of people, as symbols and metaphors for existence. The narrator proposes selfishness as the best course of action and follows through.

One might think he is redeemed by his relationship with Kate, a depressed cousin by marriage prone to flights of fancy and despair, to whom he speaks to at the behest of his Aunt. He never really tries to help her, just follows her along on the rolling waves of her thought process. And though, their relationship "grows", I am not convinced that he cares for her, because his affections always seem to be based on his ideas.

It's one of those stories that I feel I probably should like, because it's well written and serious and supposed to be "meaningful" and stuff, but the truth is all I can muster is a meh in response. I could try to think about more, to see if I'm missing something, to try to determine what I feel about it in any real sense, but the problem is, I just don't care. ( )