The Moviegoer

at first i was really liking this, the way that we see binx being lost in his life but finding his way through cinema but then it turned into something else and i myself was the one lost. i disliked the depiction of just about everyone (women, people of color) that he encountered and don't know if this is just another of the older books written by white men that i don't find any connection with, or if there was really just nothing to connect to. this won the national book award in 1960 (and was percy's first book), and i'm disappointed not to like it more.

this description is so spot on though: "...I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head."

The Moviegoer is a book that I read when I was about fourteen years old, and for some reason, out of all of the books that I read in my early teenage years, it´s always stood out in my mind. I believe that this is because the story of Binx Bolling came to represent to me what it was going to be like to be an adult. He works in an unremarkable suburb of New Orleans selling stocks, content with going to the movies at night and having a series of affairs with his secretaries. He has devised a vague “search” for meaning in his day-to-day life, identifying noteworthy occurrences in his world that elevate existence above the mundanity of the everyday. He sees a movie star walking down the street and watches a young couple notice him, and show more thinks about the effect that the foreign and famous presence has on the otherwise unremarkable scene. He seeks repetitions in movies and life that elevate normal moments in nondescript theaters to a special status, and he drives a red MG convertible because it is a car that is immune to malaise, a car that one can drive in with a woman without being overwhelmed by how plain and meaningless their life is. He uses this invented search to find, if not pleasure, then at least low-level motivation to keep going in a job and a life that to most of his family seems uninspired and disappointing. Looking back, I think that at 14 I was aware that life would at some point become more repetitive, with less options sprawling out ahead of me and more routine and boredom from day to day. I related to his creation of a language with terms that defined situations by his own individual, aesthetic and arbitrary standards, but that nonetheless made the mundane less unbearable. At 26, I worried that this book would depress me, but it didn´t. As an adult I relate to Binx and his life, and I think that it is an accurate representation of adulthood.

Binx Bolling reminds me a lot of Camus´ Meursault in The Stranger, in the way that he is detached from a lot of the desires and motivations of the people in his world. He lives in Gentilly and doesn´t associate with the New Orleans society that he is a part of. His lack of faith contrasts with the religion of some members of his family, and his search for meaning circumvents the normal places that people look to for meaning (he doesn´t want God, and he doesn´t want to become a research scientist and make important discoveries). He appears content in a life that is hard for most of his family to understand, dating unremarkable secretaries and selling mutual funds to unremarkable people, without showing desire or ambition for more. I imagine that The Moviegoer is considered an existential novel, and a quick read of Walker Percy´s biography told me that he was a doctor, and that his own search for meaning drew him to Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky and eventually to the Catholic religion due to a growing apprehension of science´s ability to explain the basic mysteries of human existence. I imagine that Binx is at least somewhat autobiographical and that his search at least partly parallels Percy´s own search for meaning in his life. With that in mind, I wonder if this search undertaken in his twenties would lead him, as in the author´s case, to religion later in life.

Besides providing me a possible blueprint for adulthood, The Moviegoer also gave me a mental image of New Orleans that I carried in my mind during the few times that I visited the city. It presents Southern aristocracy in a straightforward manner, it shows the racism still present in 1950´s Louisiana (black people are negroes in this book, they sit in the back of the bus, and so on), and it illustrates the customs and social conventions associated with Mardi Gras and the different parade krewes. My teenage conception of New Orleans, I realize, was pretty much half-Moviegoer, half-Confederacy of Dunces, and when I visited the city for the first time, I saw it through my recollection of these two novels, satisfied with the way that what I saw reflected what I remembered and expected to see based on these books. show less

I've wanted to read THE MOVIEGOER for many years, and now I finally have. My take on it may be slightly different than some. I see it as a kind of anti-war book. Its protagonist, Binx Bolling, is several years removed from his service in the Korean war, but he seems to be suffering from a kind of PTSD, which he refers to as the "malaise," or the "everydayness." Whatever he calls it, it has left him with a feeling of hopelessness, of "why bother." A moderately successful stockbroker with his uncle's New Orleans firm, Binx has no particular ambitions beyond his present circumstances. He lives his bachelor life in a bare, unadorned apartment. He engages in meaningless serial dalliances with his secretaries. He has no close friends. The show more last time he can remember life being important was when he "lay bleeding in a ditch" in Korea. He takes refuge in movies.

Walker Percy's novel also gives us a glimpse into New Orleans life in the late fifties. He shows us the inbred families of the crescent city, their attitudes toward the black servants they employ, as well as the strange, stratified carnival atmosphere of Mardi Gras. Indeed, everyone seems to expect Binx to marry his cousin, Kate, who is a story in herself, with her wildly fluctuating bipolar behavior. Binx does feel a surprisingly tender affinity toward his colorful cousin, and also shows immense tolerance and even affection for his several half-siblings, especially one who is crippled and sickly. In these particular relationships, he comes alive as a real and sympathetic character, in sharp contrast to his shallow affairs with his Marcia, Linda and Sharon secretaries.

The book starts off rather slowly, I thought, but the second half grabbed me and kept me turning pages - the parts about Kate and her family, as well as his crippled half-brother, Lonnie. I understand now why THE MOVIEGOER, first published in 1962, has long been considered a minor classic of Southern Literature. Percy is a unique sort of writer, and a damn good one. Binx Bolling is a character I will not soon forget. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Binx Bolling is a lost soul, but at least he knows he’s lost. As the ostensible hero of Walker Percy’s beautifully rendered novel The Moviegoer, an almost 30-year old Binx wanders around New Orleans as part of his Search, which is “…what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life”. He spends his days going through the motions as a stockbroker in his Uncle Jules’ business while escaping at night into the artificial world of countless movie theaters and the pursuit of a variety of women. Of course, all of this is a great disappointment to his Aunt Emily, the matriarch of the family, who has far greater plans for his life. However, when Emily asks Binx to help counsel his cousin Kate, who is show more in even a more fragile mental state than he is, all of their lives are placed on a very different path.

Set during Mardi Gras week in 1960, The Moviegoer perfectly captures the angst, disillusionment, and uncertainty of an era in which an entire generation was trying to move on from the war while facing what the future held in store. While that future seemed so promising to so many—dazzling even—the reality of day-to-day life was often depressingly mundane. In that respect, this novel shares a common theme with Richard Yates’ equally remarkable Revolutionary Road, which Percy’s work actually beat out for the National Book Award. However, this is also a very Southern tale, infused as it is with the daily rhythms, speech patterns, and local flavor of the time and the place. Above all else, it is a deceptively philosophical novel and a compelling character study that has stood the test of time.

I really enjoyed this book, which I had known by reputation for years before I finally got around to reading it. To be sure, it is not really a plot-driven story, which is something that seems to be a concern for a lot of other reviewers. From my perspective, though, I found Binx Bolling to be one the great characters in recent literature and an archetype for so many disaffected modern male protagonists (e.g., Frank Bascombe in Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter and Independence Day) who have followed. Percy’s prose is sharp and insightful, as well as occasionally funny and charming. This novel, which is so full of compelling ideas and observations, is one that I will look forward to reading again in the future. show less

It's one of my favorite books. It's true, there is not much of a plot in it, but this is part of the "message" as I understand it. Being on the search means that there's not necessarily a red line leading through a story with a clear cut plot line. And perhaps this is just one reason that makes this novel quite exceptional.

What makes this book so awesome to me is the protagonist’s (Binx Bolling) existential state of loneliness, in fact it is not only his state but humankind’s as a whole taking the existentialist’s point of view: being conscious of oneself and not knowing why one exists, loaded with an indefinite responsibility. The typical answers that might give meaning to human life, love, wealth (not art!) are unmasked as show more illusions easily. Yes, it reminds of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby in some ways. It is this strangely purposeless (is it?) life filled up with horror on different layers of meaning, a silent horror in some ways, which all seems to be accepted in a somewhat stoical way. What adds up to the authenticity of this "human search" is not described with importunity but inwardly, quiet, and even gentle. At the same time I read it as a criticism against a nonsensitive, loud and superficial "Southern environment in the beginning 60ies" (easily to be transported into any other time and place, a “chiffre” for humankind as it is and was) a normality which lacks any understanding for life's main questions. That this is a major reason for the protagonist's cousin's (Kate) depression is nothing but one more logical consequence in this subtle novel in which there is much understanding for man’s basic state of existence and its resulting bewilderment. show less

My thoughts ran back to a recent viewing of the movie adaptation of E.M. Forster’s [A Room with a View] while reading [The Moviegoer]. As Lucy Honeychurch and her aunt settled into their room, having swapped with George Emerson and his father, they find a painting hanging backwards on the wall with a large question mark scrawled on the backing. George’s father later explains that George is always asking the ‘eternal why.’ Walker Percy placed us as readers firmly in the mind of such a searcher in [The Moviegoer].

John “Binx” Bollinger’s head swims with despair and angst and those thoughts cascade through the pages of the novel as he narrates his days. From his dalliances with his secretaries to his proposal to a drug-addled, show more suicidal girlfriend, Binx stumbles through life, more focused on an internal panorama, fueled by movies, than real human connection.

The line in Percy’s story between dark, cynical humor and sadness is blurry. Whether to chuckle or recoil at Binx’ life poses a difficultly for the reader. But whichever course you take, the novel is a lively read. The only true downside is the 1950’s movie and personality references which may be lost on all but the diehard movie fan.

4 bones!!!! show less

Like a heaping plate of comfort food for me. Also contains one of my favorite quotes in a novel: “Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals.” Hell yeah. But wait, there’s more.

Binx Bolling doesn’t seem to be having a bad time of it, a young man successfully managing an office of the family brokerage firm in 1959/1960 New Orleans, having a series of dalliances with his secretaries, and going to a lot of movies. Only unlike most of us, he has the knowledge that such things are merely an effort to keep the existential despair at bay at the forefront of his mind. He instinctually feels the quote from Kierkegaard that is the novel’s epigraph: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: show more it is unaware of being despair”. Now he knows he is in despair and thus he is a bit better off by Kierkegaard’s reckoning, a step closer to the solution to it, but he is still a long way off a grounding of himself in religious faith. The forms and husk of religion are all around him of course, being plenty thick in the “Christ-haunted” but not “Christ-centered” South, as Flannery O’Connor memorably phrased it, but Kierkegaard too would have recognized the deadness of them. The best Binx can do is an awareness of “wonder” and a rejection of that which he feels too grossly ignores or obscures the wonder.

His state of despair and inadequate search for resolution to it are best recognized for what they are by his step-cousin Kate, who is often in the grip of a strong depression, who seems possibly bipolar. Like recognizes like, in a manner. She tells him, “You remind me of a prisoner in the death house who takes a wry pleasure in doing things like registering to vote. Come to think of it, all your gaiety and good spirits have the same death house quality. No thanks. I’ve had enough of your death house pranks”. She tells him, “It is possible, you know, that you are overlooking something, the most obvious thing of all. And you would not know it if you fell over it.” Not that she knows what it is either, rather she’s given up the possible search: “Don’t you worry. I’m not going to swallow all the pills at once. Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.”

Binx, like Kate and Kierkegaard, understands the commonplace human tendency to hide our despair from ourselves, what he calls “sinking into everydayness”, even if the three of them (in the novel’s current moment at least) exist in pretty different places after similarly escaping it. Kierkegaard thinks he knows the answer. Kate thinks there is no answer. Binx, as befits a more modern day literary fiction hero, embraces uncertainty. Watching an apparently materially successful African-American man exiting church on Ash Wednesday, the ending day of the novel, ashes marked on forehead, he thinks

I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.

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