The Moviegoer

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

Before reading I was warned that not much really happens, and this is mostly true. Of course, things do happen, but the plot is not really the focus. Binx notices things, and on a superficial level at least, notices deeply.

The basic premise is this: Binx is a well-to-do stockbroker from New Orleans, who has a good job, is not short of female companionship, and enjoys solid social standing. He is a (Korean) war veteran, has family that care for him (and who he cares about). But he feels that something is missing.

He says that he would swap places with his half-brother Lonnie - a 14-year-old boy who is very sick, disabled, and eventually dies. His (sort of) cousin says she felt most alive on the day her fiancé died in a crash that she show more herself was also involved in. Are these people spoiled? Is there really a malaise? Or just people who fail to appreciate how comfortable their lives are? There are references to black people (story is set in New Orleans, and the book was published in 1961), but does Binx see the humanity in other people? For all of his introspection, his navel-gazing about "the search", "rotations", and "certification" are not really deep and insightful questions about life, but shallow justifications from a man who refuses to take responsibility for his own life, and to form meaningful relationships with the people around him. He falls in love with his secretary, but soon grows bored of her (onto a new rotation?), and eventually settles down with his step-cousin Kate - a damaged woman who seems to have less empathy than he does. I suppose they need each other. The implication is that something fundamental has changed with Binx at the end. That he is now finally taking responsibility for something and for someone.

The best part of the book comes towards the end when Binx's aunt, Aunt Emily, spells some of this out to him. This begins on the bottom of page 223 in my book and is a passage I will return to. Percy's description of the horizontal search is especially astute; the way he describes how people search for meaning superficially, by moving from one thing to the next (girlfriends, films, places) will resonate with many, and the emphasis on the vertical search in pursuit of meaning is interesting - but with that can come solipsism and a failure to engage with those around you in a way that recognises their plights, their struggles, and their search for meaning. I think Aunt Emily has read Binx's cards, and has found him wanting.

So why 3.5 stars? Stylistically the book is challenging. As I said, Binx is very introspective and notices minor things. To portray this the book is very descriptive, with long passages that meander and reflect. But the reflections are shallow - as per Binx's character. A fascinating book, but I must say that in parts I endured it. Perhaps a better understanding of Kierkegaard would help here, as Percy scaffolds the novel through this framework, and also of Camus - the similarities to The Stranger are clear. 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

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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Binx Bolling is a man in search of meaning. His life doesn’t seem to have much meaning; he goes to movies and engages in sex with a string of vacuous young women who occupy the front office secretarial position in his office. He doesn’t seem to belong to anything or anyone, but then we find he has a family and that his life is not unentangled, it is possibly too deeply entangled. There is no shortage of persons to tell him who he is, or at least who he ought to be, only a shortage of people who actually know who he is or want to see him for himself. But then, there is his cousin (not really because his aunt is only her stepmother), Kate, and Kate, like him, is a searcher who cannot find her way.

I loved the way this story developed, show more particularly the psychological unveiling of the characters as the plot unfolds. Binx has reasons for his state of confusion, he has survived the trauma of the Korean War and he has failed to pick up his life and sink back into the oblivion of the everyday. Kate, likewise, has endured a traumatic event and been left running from the loss of her planned future and the pointlessness of the life that has been spared to her. Aunt Emily is their foil: she is sure she knows what life is about and that she has all the answers, and she seems unable to grasp why these kids don’t just follow instructions and join the dance in-step.

Percy has woven very believable characters into a very realistic world. It is a world of class distinction, pre-determined futures, and family expectations. And, his South seems very real as well. That he understands his subject is obvious. He captures the world of New Orleans and the pressures of a Southern identity.

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he stop off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.

Percy won the National Book Award for this, his first, novel, and I can see why. It has a lot going on beneath the surface. I imagine many of us have hoped to escape into the safety of a movie screen, where at least a happily-ever-after is a possibility. The problem: any such escape is temporary, when you exit the theater, you find life waiting to chew you up again. What Binx Bolling discovers is that there are no ordinary lives, there are just lives in which all the meaning we need, or get, might rest in the most ordinary of things and days, and the people who are able to see beyond our surface and glimpse into our soul. show less

Unlike some of Percy's other novels, this is a fairly straightforward novel that presents itself as an indepth character study, complex in conception if not in design. The writing here is both elegant and striking, and I'd recommend it as a classic character study exploring the twentieth century American's position in a world understood as extraordinary, and experienced as mundane. It's a quiet book, and one worth exploring---surprisingly addictive once begun.