Rating: 
Summary: Malaise & Everydayness & Binx Bolling
Review: What is a moviegoer? A moviegoer is someone who sees movies to escape from the "everydayness" and malaise of life. Binx Bolling is a moviegoer.Binx is in malaise, "My wallet is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards. Last year I purchased a flat olive-drab strongbox ... in which I placed my birth certificate, college diploma, honorable discharge, G.I. Insurance, a few stock certificates and my inheritance ... It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one's name on it certifying, so to speak, one's right to exist." This is malaise. Whenever one courts great happiness, he risks the malaise. That is the story of this novel. Binx Bolling goes about looking for something out of the ordinary (i.e., a new fling) knowing full well that when the novelty is gone, the malaise will return. The only time the grip of everyday life was truly broken was when he lay shot in a ditch during the Korean War. Partly because of his topic, the malaise, Percy's effort never comes to any definite conclusions except a resignation that Binx has got it as good as he will allow it to be. In that respect, I was somewhat disappointed because there was no happy nor tragic ending. However, reading this novel reminded me somewhat of the Great Gatsby. Walker Percy writes incredibly well. I feel like I really lucked out by being able to borrow this book for a bit. If you get the chance, read the book. I'm glad I did.
Rating: 
Summary: Binx Bolling's Consciousness
Review: Something happens when the theatre lights go up after an especially engrossing film. You leave the theatre and are yanked back into ordinary life. It's almost like waking from an especially harrowing dream and finding yourself back in your own bed. The streets are all the same, but somehow you have temporarily been revived from the relentless predictability of your everyday life and everything looks a little more promising. For the time being life looks fresh. The same can be said of near disasters and other extraordinary events. Disruptions often jar things loose, cause us to reevaluate and at least temporarily reorder our values and priorities. Some cherish predictability while others are brought to despair by it. Walker Percy's Binx Bolling is a moviegoer and a harmless womanizer. Binx is surrounded by Southern gentility and he himself, an accomplished gentleman, is comfortable in polite society. Yet Binx the moviegoer is a free agent...an independent observer. The absurdity of every day life is a curiosity to Bolling. Percy provides us with a thoroughly agreeable escapist, but not one who escapes out of weakness, but rather one whose intellectual detachment requires harmless distraction to remain engaged. I cannot recommend this work to readers who enjoy books with intriguing plots and lively action and who are turned off by nuance and philosophical exploration. There is an elegant subtlety to this work that is both dry and fresh. The book contains many memorable scenes and is spare yet precise in its descriptive power. There are few books that I have read that take be by surprise the way this one has, not by a trick ending, but by revealing a deeper measure of some aspect of character that I thought I had completely understood, but had not. It's hard for me to describe the acceleration of fascination I experienced towards the conclusion of The Movie-goer and I haven't seen it mentioned in other reviews. The power of this work blindsided me with both surprise and delight. The moviegoer left me remembering vaguely important and long ago forgotten ideas and left me hungry to read all of Mr. Percy's other novels. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: catcher in the rye for grownups
Review: Walker Percy's the Moviegoer combines a searing dry wit with a true sorrowful lament of contemporary culture as it follows investment banker Jack "Binx" Bolling as he muddles through an identity crisis. Raised to be a polite southern gentleman, an "upstanding citizen," Binx finds himself deep in an impenetrable malaise of everday existence which can only be broken by moviegoing. Suffering as well is his cousin Kate, whose own malaise leads her to the brink of suicide. Suddenly, the memory of an experience in the Korean War awakes Binx to the "search" which promises to lead him to his true self, if he can only break through the mundane. The book is masterfully written on many levels, and Percy seems equally comfortable commiseraating with and laughing at the metaphysical struggles of his characters. His prose is sparse and clear, yet he adroitly plays with the meaning and sound of words. I believe this is one of the most underappreciated books of the 20th century, and one which very well may hold the answer of how we can all save ourselves from Percy's "elysian" hell.
Rating: 
Summary: Stimulating and fun and clever and empty
Review: I was extremely reminded of John Barth's THE END OF THE ROAD. Especially in the ending's of each book and the main characters' responses to the lashings they take from their morally sound friends. There were beautiful, subtle, complex reasons for the way that Binx acted but he wouldn't or couldn't explain them to those who condemn him. He can only explain himself to the audience he narrates to, and we believe in him even if his aunt doesn't. This is one of those great novels where twisted characters explain themselves in the narrative in a way that would be impossible in reality.
Rating:
Summary: Good National Book Award winning novel
Review: Walker Percy's "Moviegoer" is Percy's first novel and one for which he won the National Book award. I just reread this novel for the second time hoping to gain a greater understanding of it. Like other reviewers have pointed out, Percy's work tends to be heavily weighted with philosophical or psychological overtones. (Not being well-read or trained in such areas I found no such theme to comment on.) One Percy scholar even said that the philosophical foundations for this novel were laid in Percy's essay "The Man on the Train: Three Existential Modes". A train is obviously prominent in "The Moviegoer". But regarding existentialism I haven't a clue what that means so I don't know if you will find any such themes in the novel. Other reviewers have already laid out the plot of "The Moviegoer" for you. Binx Bolling idles through life on some kind of search the target of which is never made clear. As he happens along he notices malaise all about him and despair. Binx himself is in a kind of funk and the character Kate suffers a more serious depression. A quote from Kierkegaard in the front of the book signals the importance of this theme: "...the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." When he is not selling stocks, Binx spends his time in pursuit of female company. Binx says: "For some years now I have had no friends. I spend my entire time working, making money, going to movies, and seeking the company of women." The most lyrical sections of the novel are where Percy describes the various targets of Binx Bolling's lust: "She is a strapping girl but by no means too big, done up head to toe in cellophane, the hood pushed back to show a helmet of glossy black hair. She is magnificent with her split tooth and her Price Val bangs split on her forehead." One's heart flutters as the girl gets off the city bus and is forever gone out Bink Bolling's life. Walker Percy's friend and mentor Shelby Foote (they went to school together at UNC) thought that "The Moviegoer" had one fault and that "it's so big you can't do anything about it". Writing in a letter to his friend he wrote: "The last third gets so caught up in the story ... that it changes in tone as well. For one thing your hero is no longer a moviegoer." I am inclined to agree. Early in the novel Percy sends Binx into the movie theater to show him as someone who is a loner. He even spies a movie star on the street of New Orleans, where the novel is set. But in the end the Moviegoer only sees one film and that is with a female companion. Perhaps the title "The Moviegoer" makes that idea too prominent. In "The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy" Percy discusses other titles that the novel might have had including "Carnival in Gentilly". Perhaps the most dramatic part of the novel is the dressing down that Binx gets from his Aunt Emily after he and Kate have gone away together. Binx has clearly misbehaved badly. He offers an apology but he doesn't seem to understand that he has done anything wrong. I enjoyed as well the descriptions of life in and around New Orleans: picking crabs, eating crawfish, and fishing for red fish (channel bass).
Rating:
Summary: not his best
Review: In this National Book Award Winner, John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling is a 29 year old, small-time suburban New Orleans stockbroker. To this point in his life, he's been content to carry on "love affairs" with a succession of secretaries, "the Lindas", & frequent the movies. "I am a model tenant and a model citizen and take pleasure in doing all that is expected of me. My wallet is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards.... It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one's name on it certifying, so to speak, one's right to exist." "I am a stock and bond broker. It is true that my family was somewhat disappointed in my choice of profession. 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..." But things have suddenly changed, "This morning, for the first time in years, there occurred to me the possibility of a search....the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." And merely, "to become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." So we follow Binx during one Mardi Gras as he goes in search of the something that transcends the every day. Percy was a convert to Catholicism & his books tend to concern men who are at odds with the moral tenor of their times. It is interesting that Richard Ford's The Sportswriter was compared to The Moviegoer, because it seems to me that Binx Bolling is in many ways a Frank Bascombe in the making. When the novel ends, & his search is presumably over, Binx has made choices that I was not confident would satisfy his desire for transcendence. I fear his search is not over. I like Walker Percy generally, but I much prefer The Last Gentleman or even The Thanatos Syndrome. GRADE: C+
Rating:
Summary: Funny, beautiful, sad - a wonderful book
Review: As Walker Percy's career progressed, his focus seemed to shift from creating well-rounded characters to producing books that were essentially fictionalizations of various works of philosophy. The Moviegoer strikes the perfect balance between ideas and people. He succeeds in writing a book about loneliness and isolation without ever seeming sappy or sentimental; he creates a whole cast of fully developed characters who are deeply flawed but always sympathetic. And one is always struck by the strangeness of the characters. They are absolute originals. I haven't met anyone like Kate in the pages of a novel before or since, but one still somehow relates to every one of them, and can feel connections with their longing for . . . in any case, all of that is irrelevant. It is a great book, I encourage everyone to read it.
Rating:
Summary: maybe its me....
Review: Maybe my expectations were a little too high since it is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the 20th century. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to fully appreciate this book. Who knows, I just expected to walk away with more than I did after reading Moviegoer. While I can appreciate how articulate and insightful the book was, the lack of plot failed to keep me interested in the book. Yes it was richly textured and filled with beautiful prose but I need a little more substance out of a book. I think I would have appreciated it more if I had been forced to read it in one sitting, but being a person with only limited time each day to devote to reading, the book just didn't call to me or occupy my thoughts while away.
Rating:
Summary: The Wonder
Review: Whoa, if you haven't read the novel yet, be careful before you read some of the following reviews. A few of them summarize the entire book and give away the ending. It's not that The Moviegoer is a mystery, or a thriller with a climactic gunfight, but who wants to know the ending before starting from the beginning? This is one of the very few books that made me rethink my life. I didn't have a spiritual awakening, exactly-- there was nothing religious about the effect-- but Percy made me realize how easily we can let the wonder seep out of our lives, and how vigilant we must be to guard against such a loss. I read The Moviegoer in a kind of daze of recognition. That was ten years ago, but I still think about this book all the time, whenever I forget to be grateful for existing.
Rating:
Summary: are you awake?
Review: The moviegoer, written by Walker Percy, is a wonderful peace of work that shows the triumphs and hardships of life. The main character is Binx, a young man who lives in New Orleans. His aunt Emily lives in the Garden District, one of the richer areas in New Orleans. She fells that Binx should be Lawyer or a doctor because of his upbringing. But Binx does not fell that way. Binx wants to create his own life, so he goes on a search to fulfill his life's plan. During this search Binx follows many people around. One experience he elaborates on is when he follows a movie star around. During this time he observes the people who she talks to and the typical day in her life and he comes to the conclusion that she is trapped in everydayness. Everydayness is term that Binx made; it means to do the same thing all the time, day in and day out. In this search Binx also looks for a woman. The name of the woman he finds is Kate, which fulfills this portion of his search. I like the Moviegoer because it tells the truth about life. I also think that we could learn a few things from Binx about how to live fully and make our lives better, so we don't get caught up in the everydayness as others have.
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