Rating: 
Summary: Stunning
Review: Binx Bolling seems like an average guy. He goes to movies, he sells real estate, he chases his secretaries. The problem is, he really enjoys none of it. The happiest moment in his life came during the Korean war, when he was wounded. The experience shocked him out of the social facade that most of us spend our whole lives in, generally without knowing it's even there. He's been quietly, desperately searching for reality ever since. Will he find it? Will you?
Rating:
Summary: The Moviegoer is fabulous...
Review: I first read this book 20 years ago and have never been able to forget it, or its characters. It made me want to read everything else Percy ever wrote (all good, but this remains my fave). I have given it as a gift to more people than I can count, and it is one of only 5 books in my life that I ever went back and read again years later. It is a wonderful peek into a dysfunctional southern family; an ode to trying hard, keeping it real, getting by, and reflecting on the wonder of the movies...
Rating:
Summary: Southerners and their values
Review: In The Moviegoer, Percy lays out the foundation of two so-called "cures" for isolation and boredom. The first is the devotion to duty and traditional Southern values, as exemplified by Aunt Emily. The second is the mystery and absurdity of Catholicism, and Ash Wednesday as taught and practiced by Binx's unconventionally catholic mother.
John Binkerson ("Binx") Bolling is a self-described fine, contributing citizen of a New Orleans family who for some years has devoted himself to money, sex, and watching movies. The movies in which Binx immerses himself is our first clue to the superficiality and lack of "substance" in his own life. The novel begins during Mardi Gras when Binx begins to feel a need for something more substantial in his life. We meet his Aunt Emily, a fine Southern woman of the community, and Kate, his cousin whom others view as unstable since her fiancé's death some years earlier.
All of this takes place on the bayous, where Binx visits his mother and her new family. (Binx's father died in World War II; Binx, served in the Korean War.) After this visit, Binx goes to Chicago with Kate where, unlike in the movies, he is forced to answer questions, make decisions and live with the effects those decisions have on the lives of others.
Rating:
Summary: But I can see how one might not like it
Review: It's interesting to look over other readers' reactions. For someone who has never felt lost or depressed, and has never suffered from the lack of a sense of purpose, I can see how this book would be incomprehensible. Walker doesn't dot all the i's in describing his characters' inner world, and the changes they undergo are gradual and subtle. In fact, I sometimes wished he had filled in the blanks a little more, but perhaps doing so would have turned Binx into a very different, more intellectual and articulate character.First, in a world where depression has been largely medicalized, it's liberating to read a novel which describes it as a spiritual condition, and a natural reaction to meaninglessness. Binx's aunt and everyone else treats Kate as sick, but Binx understands her despair as a more acute version of his own malaise. He is the only one who takes her words and actions at face value, as expressions of who she is, and so the only one who can help her. Throughout the book, people offer their own value systems, their own solutions to the search. Binx listens to them attentively, but he has too much self-knowledge to settle for something that doesn't feel like truth to him, even if he cannot explain why. He admires his aunt and her old-fashioned, aristocratic ethos, but he does not accept it. Yet he is so self-effacing that it is only at the end of the book that she discovers this. That scene is beautifully written, and rings very true. The "This I Believe" radio show, on the other hand, is a hoot.
Rating:
Summary: Of movies and the search for the meaning of life
Review: Some readers may be surprised with the fact that Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" is such a short novel, and, at the same time, so profound a work, dealing with important themes like the sense of living, God, love and movies. As far as the search for spiritual values go, they can't be found in money, sex or in mundane things-- therefore, the book and its protagonist and narrator embarks in a quest to find those values in another place -- but not most of the time.
This man, Binx Bolling, is a Korean War veteran coming up on his 30th birthday. His family is an old and eccentric New Orleans rich clan. However he is the black sheep, since he quitted the medical school and work as a stock broker. He also moved to the suburbs and spends his time mostly making money for his clients, dating his secretaries and going to the movies. In this sense, Percy wrote the typical bachelor's life, that is at some point superficial and comfortable.
More than a hero, Binx is an anti-hero, virtually molded after Percy himself. Like his creator, the character comes from an old-money family and had a suicidal father. The suicide becomes an issue in their lives. Since the opening quote in "The Moviegoer", the writer proves that suicide has an important role in the novel.
In Binx's life, one of the most important characters is his cousin Kate --to whom he is more involved than he wanted to be. She is the only one who he can be frank to. Both of them are kind of self-aware in a world of faux people, who pretend things they are not, or don't believe. However. Binx and Kate deal in different ways when it comes to the fact they `live in a world apart'.
He prefers to go through the motions, wandering around, acquitting the most information he can, going to the movies. But these pieces of information are sort of banal most of the time. What he really cares about are the details, such as the lives of the movie theater employees, his half siblings. Comparing Binx's attitude to the movies he goes, it is like he was more interested in the technical achievement of the films, like cinematography, set and costume design etc, rather than the plot and character itself.
Kate, on the other hand, despite living in the same world as Binx is aware they are different. At some point she says, "You're like me, but worse. Much worse." She realizes they live in the same world, but she has another approach to life. She doesn't search and observation, she lives in her own crisis. That is one of the reasons that her character is so human and profound.
During the course of weeks we follow them, both lives are dramatically changed --mostly Binx's. He tries to bring substance to his life -- which he felt was missing. Kate, love and God have an important role in this quest. In the end, she is a different person herself too. And probably the reader's life won't be the same as well. Walker Percy's masterpiece is likely to bring a lot of new points and quests in everyone's journey.
Rating: 
Summary: Once is enough
Review: Someone recommeded this novel for our book club. Seeing that it was ranked 60th on the Modern library list for the 20th century, I had high expectations.
I struggled through the first 50-60 pages and almost set it aside. To put it mildly, I was bored. But I persevered and finished it. This novel has minimal plot and characters that you do not come to love. Binx Bolling,age 29, is wandering though life in a pre-midlife crisis. He has a respectable job(a broker) with a reasonable income but he lacks a purpose. He goes to movies for pleasure and seduces his secretaries.
The setting is interesting-New Orleans in the 1950s. The whole novel takes place over a few days around the Mardi Gras. Binx suffers from malaise. His cousin Kate exhibits bouts of mania and melancholy and would no doubt now be considered to be a manic-depressive. She is suicidal. She lost her financee in an automobile accident some time before the novel begins. She and Binx have a curious relationship which culminates in sex in the latter portion of the novel.
Just as it seems that Binx is breaking out of malaise and his detached-observer status, Binx answers a summons by his patron, Aunt Emily, and returns hastily to New Orleans where he is given a good lecture by the aunt. He decided to marry Kate so as to help manage her moods and , after having resisted his aunt's entreaties for years to study for a profession, Binx yields and heads off to medical school.
The only characters who elicit some empathy are Binx's mother and his half-brother and-sisters. They live a lowerclass but seemingly more real life style.
The driving force behind this book is existentialism. As one of my colleagues put it, it is Camus Lite. Walker Percy lost both his grandfather and father to suicide, and his mother in an automobile accident. He trained as a doctor, became ill with tuberculosis, did a pschyoanalytic residency and became enamoured with several existentialist philosophers. Elements of all these influences infuse this novel.
Do I reget reading this novel? No. Would I read it again? No.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the Novel That's Influenced Me Most
Review: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy is possibly the finest novel that I have ever read. It is easily the most profound existential text that I have ever come, across and it is without doubt one of the masterworks of its century. The novel doesn't focus on the plot much; it is mainly concerned with the development of the narrator, Binx Bolling. Binx is a businessman living in New Orleans. One week before his thirtieth birthday, he becomes aware of the Search. The Search is his existential quest to find meaning in life. Binx is also involved in a complex relationship with Kate, who is in a similar state as Binx. Together, they set out on a quest to find authenticity. The Moviegoer, though not a difficult read, is definitely too complex to describe in a short review. It has such amazing strengths. The narrative is leisurely paced and always humorous. The relationships are complex and satisfying. Binx's Search is insightful, and its conclusion, Binx's leap to love, his embrace of the "mundane" world and of humanity (and God), is subtle and profound. I really cannot say enough good things about this novel, and I cannot express how much it means to me. I urge everyone to read this masterful, beautiful novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Clever Binx
Review: The moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a successful businessman and a member of a prominent and eccentric New Orleans family. He is unmarried and enjoys the escape that going to the movies provides. He is unable to keep himself from dating his secretaries, and he is constantly trying to hold "despair" at bay. The Moviegoer is an existential novel of the American suburbs where Binx tries to find meaning or hope in the midst of mundanity. But it isn't preachy or didactic; it meanders and searches, and one begins to wonder if Binx is a madman and not just a lonely bachelor. In this sense it has a lot more depth than some other books of middle-aged male suburban angst that I've read over the years, The Sportswriter and Independence Day by Richard Ford and Wheat That Springeth Green by J.F. Powers to name a few, and Binx seems far more ethereal than Frank Bascombe or Joe Hackett. It's short and cleverly written, and I recommend the book to anyone with a taste for the internal monologues of a Southern thinker.
Rating:
Summary: A Book That Should Be Read . . . And Then Read Again
Review: Walker Percy was forty-six years old when his first published novel, "The Moviegoer", was awarded the National Book Award in 1962. It was, in some sense, the public beginning of the second half of Percy's life for, as Percy himself wrote in 1972: "Life is much stranger than art-and often more geometrical. My life breaks exactly in half: 1st half=growing up Southern and medical; 2nd half=imposing art on 1st half." But what, exactly, did Percy mean when he said this? In some sense, "The Moviegoer" is the beginning of an answer. Percy was born in 1915 and lived his early life in Birmingham, Alabama. His grandfather committed suicide when Walker was an infant and his father, too, committed suicide in 1929. Following his father's suicide, his mother moved Walker and his two brothers to Mississippi. Percy's family was one of the oldest families in the South and he and his brothers soon found a father figure in the form of his cousin, William Alexander Percy, known affectionately as Uncle Will. Three years after his father's suicide, Percy's life was again marked by tragedy when his mother's car went off a bridge, killing her and leaving Walker and his brothers in the charge of his Uncle Will. Percy went to medical school at Columbia University, where he contracted tuberculosis during his internship. In and out of sanitariums for several years, he finally returned to the South in his early 30s, getting married in 1946 and settling in the New Orleans area, where he lived the remainder of his life. It was at this time that Percy received an inheritance from his Uncle Will that allowed him to devote himself completely to his long-standing interest in literature and philosophy. I relate the biographical details because, as you read "The Moviegoer", it seems (not surprisingly) heavily marked by Percy's life experience, the author's biography being one point of reference for the novel. "The Moviegoer" is a peculiarly American and belated expression of the existential novel that had been so brilliantly articulated in France by Albert Camus. Like "The Stranger", Percy's novel focuses on meaning-in this case, the obsession of Binx Bolling, the novel's narrator, on what he calls the "search". As Bolling says at one point, "the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." And exactly what does this mean? "To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." An enigmatic definition, but one which makes the reader who spends time with "The Moviegoer", who reads the book carefully and reflectively, to think more deeply about his or her own life. "The Moviegoer" is not a novel dominated by plot. At a superficial level, the novel relates, in a wry and matter-of-fact way, a few days in the seemingly unremarkable life of Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker whose main activities are going to the movies and carrying on with each of his successive secretaries. "Once I thought of going into law or medicine or even pure science. I even dreamed of doing something great. But there is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings; selling stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quitting work at five o'clock like everyone else; having a girl and perhaps one day settling down and raising a flock of Marcias and Sandras and Lindas of my own." What "The Moviegoer" suggests is resonant of Thoreau's contention that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. But it is a desperation that arises not from the ordinariness of everyday lives, but, rather, from the failure to transform that ordinariness through contemplation and self-reflection, through an appreciation for the mundane. Thus, in the book's epigraph, Percy quotes Kierkegaard: "the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." As Percy has suggested in another of his books, "Lost in the Cosmos" (a work of non-fiction subtitled "The Last Self-Help Book"), we inhabit a society of alienated and despairing "non-suicides" who Percy wanted to transform, through his writing, into "ex-suicides". In Binx Bolling's words: "For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of the sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death . . . At times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say." "The Moviegoer" is a thoughtful and a thought-provoking book that should be read and then re-read, slowly and carefully, for every paragraph is laden with insight into the character of its narrator, the character of its author and, ultimately, the character of ourselves.
Rating:
Summary: A Book That Should Be Read . . . And Then Read Again
Review: Walker Percy was forty-six years old when his first published novel, "The Moviegoer," was awarded the National Book Award in 1962. It was, in some sense, the public beginning of the second half of Percy's life for, as Percy himself wrote in 1972: "Life is much stranger than art-and often more geometrical. My life breaks exactly in half: 1st half=growing up Southern and medical; 2nd half=imposing art on 1st half." But what, exactly, did Percy mean when he said this? In some sense, "The Moviegoer" is the beginning of an answer. Percy was born in 1915 and lived his early life in Birmingham, Alabama. His grandfather committed suicide when Walker was an infant and his father, too, committed suicide in 1929. Following his father's suicide, his mother moved Walker and his two brothers to Mississippi. Percy's family was one of the oldest families in the South and he and his brothers soon found a father figure in the form of his cousin, William Alexander Percy, known affectionately as Uncle Will. Three years after his father's suicide, Percy's life was again marked by tragedy when his mother's car went off a bridge, killing her and leaving Walker and his brothers in the charge of his Uncle Will. Percy went to medical school at Columbia University, where he contracted tuberculosis during his internship. In and out of sanitariums for several years, he finally returned to the South in his early 30s, getting married in 1946 and settling in the New Orleans area, where he lived the remainder of his life. It was at this time that Percy received an inheritance from his Uncle Will that allowed him to devote himself completely to his long-standing interest in literature and philosophy. I relate the biographical details because, as you read "The Moviegoer," it seems (not surprisingly) heavily marked by Percy's life experience, the author's biography being one point of reference for the novel. "The Moviegoer" is a peculiarly American and belated expression of the existential novel that had been so brilliantly articulated in France by Albert Camus. Like "The Stranger," Percy's novel focuses on meaning-in this case, the obsession of Binx Bolling, the novel's narrator, on what he calls the "search". As Bolling says at one point, "the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." And exactly what does this mean? "To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." An enigmatic definition, but one which makes the reader who spends time with "The Moviegoer," who reads the book carefully and reflectively, to think more deeply about his or her own life. "The Moviegoer" is not a novel dominated by plot. At a superficial level, the novel relates, in a wry and matter-of-fact way, a few days in the seemingly unremarkable life of Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker whose main activities are going to the movies and carrying on with each of his successive secretaries. "Once I thought of going into law or medicine or even pure science. I even dreamed of doing something great. But there is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings; selling stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quitting work at five o'clock like everyone else; having a girl and perhaps one day settling down and raising a flock of Marcias and Sandras and Lindas of my own." What "The Moviegoer" suggests is resonant of Thoreau's contention that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. But it is a desperation that arises not from the ordinariness of everyday lives, but, rather, from the failure to transform that ordinariness through contemplation and self-reflection, through an appreciation for the mundane. Thus, in the book's epigraph, Percy quotes Kierkegaard: "the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." As Percy has suggested in another of his books, "Lost in the Cosmos" (a work of non-fiction subtitled "The Last Self-Help Book"), we inhabit a society of alienated and despairing "non-suicides" who Percy wanted to transform, through his writing, into "ex-suicides". In Binx Bolling's words: "For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of the sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death . . . At times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say." "The Moviegoer" is a thoughtful and a thought-provoking book that should be read and then re-read, slowly and carefully, for every paragraph is laden with insight into the character of its narrator, the character of its author and, ultimately, the character of ourselves.
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