The Moviegoer (1343)

Rating:
Summary: Lost on Bourbon Street
Review: Walker Percy wrote the Moviegoer, a Southern novel with William Faulkner and Truman Capote in mind. The latter writers were certainly more famous though Percy won the National Book Award in 1960. Percy is a Post-Modern, so understand, life or its meaning are lost somewhere on Bourbon Street. Redemption, it's on the silver screen if only it could be captured and held. Binx Dixon is a young man with a good job and a need to believe in something. His cousin by marriage is beautiful but suicidal. If he tells her how to live, then she may bloom again. If only he could figure out what is a moral way to live in the 1950's existential ether. Brilliantly written, the Post-Modern train of thought is forgivable. We want to know if Binx and company can find peace during Mardi Gras.

Rating:
Summary: Lost on Bourbon Street
Review: Walker Percy wrote the Moviegoer, a Southern novel with William Faulkner and Truman Capote in mind. The latter writers were certainly more famous though Percy won the National Book Award in 1960. Percy is a Post-Modern, so understand, life or its meaning are lost somewhere on Bourbon Street. Redemption, it's on the silver screen if only it could be captured and held. Binx Dixon is a young man with a good job and a need to believe in something. His cousin by marriage is beautiful but suicidal. If he tells her how to live, then she may bloom again. If only he could figure out what is a moral way to live in the 1950's existential ether. Brilliantly written, the Post-Modern train of thought is forgivable. We want to know if Binx and company can find peace during Mardi Gras.

Rating:
Summary: Meursault meets Jake Barnes in New Orleans
Review: Walker Percy's 1961 National Book Award winning book The Moviegoer introduced Camus's existentialism to the Deep South. Writing with the same detached voice as Meursault from The Stranger, Percy depicts the waning glory of New Orleans society at the end of the 1950s.

Jack "Binx" Bolling is a moviegoer. He spends his days as a stock broker and his evenings going to the movies and pursuing one girl or another (usually his secretaries). But since returning after an honorable discharge from the Korean War (he was shot in the shoulder), Binx feels disconnected from his world, confused by the New Orleans society that his Aunt wishes he would join. Just before his thirtieth birthday, Binx's faith in life is rejuvenated by an epiphany that he calls the "search." What he is searching for Binx can not articulate, but it gives his life new purpose.

While Binx seems to move in his word without interacting, watching it as he watches his movies, it would be wrong to think of him merely as an existentialist. In fact, he more closely resembles Jake Barnes, from Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises--an injured soldier moving through life listlessly, having a close but not consummated relationship with an equally distraught woman. For Binx, the woman is his cousin through marriage, Kate Cutrer, a suicidal disaffected young girl. But unlike Barnes, Binx, living in the middle of the twentieth century, must suffer not just from his war memories, but from the constant reminder that the war is never ending--the threat of an atomic bomb. And so, Binx has his movies.

Binx explains his moviegoing as such: "Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

Percy, like all good Southern writers, is a storyteller. Or rather, he tells a story about a people who are storytellers, and all of the people who populate The Moviegoer certainly are storytellers of the first order. They seem to spend all of their time talking of the past, or spinning webs of the possible future. This gives the whole of the book a sepia tone of memory, which is softer than Binx's first person detachment.

Initially, the vast number of characters that are introduced, and all of them have names, and all of them have relatives, living or dead, who also have names, can be confusing and make the book difficult to get into. But it is well worth sticking with it. As the story progresses, the main characters become apparent, and any ancillary characters are introduced clearly as we see them.

Percy has a deft ability to distill deep thoughts--about the nature of life, about society, about people--into simple, exquisite truths that never feel hokey or forced. And his people are vivid, their interactions complicated and real.

I highly recommend The Moviegoer. Fans of New Orleans literature--Truman Capote, Kate Chopin, will you allow me to include Faulkner--will be happy to find another brilliant Southern voice. And fans of introspective, philosophical novels--like The Stranger and like The Sun Also Rises--will have plenty to work with here.

Rating:
Summary: The Search without an Answer
Review: Walker Percy's book, "The Moviegoer" certainly has its moments. However, the whole doesn't live up to the sum of its parts.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the book is its organization of material. While things take place in the present, that now is constantly interrupted with reflections and memories and digressions to such a degree that the present becomes hard to follow. For example, something like:

I walked down the street.
Clara used to walk down the same street when I was....
I turned left.
Left is an interesting direction.....
I stopped to tie my shoe.
Clara never wore shoes, she....

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Also, I don't like how this search Binx is on leads to nowhere. He has no real enlightenment at the end of the book. He just accepts what everyone else wants for him. Will he be happy? I don't think so. But Binx doesn't seem to care about anything anymore - not even his own malaise. What am I supposed to get out of that?

Sure, the book has existential themes, but more than anything it really documents a vague feeling of depression that - WARNING - is catchy while reading this book.

The book works best when it describes the movie-going phenomenon. This hyper reality seems true. However, why does Binx fear not having such more-real-than-real moments? Does anyone else?

In summary, you won't get much enjoyment or enlightenment from "The Moviegoer." Its moments are few and far between.