Rating: 
Summary: The Moviegoer
Review: I recently read The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Binx Bolling, the main character is a middle-aged man caught up in the malaise of everyday life. Binx is devoted to his work as a stockbroker, although his Aunt Emily constantly nags him about becoming something better such as a doctor or a lawyer, which he least desires. She also wants him to wed his cousin Kate who is still devastated by her fiancé's death. At the end of the book he ends up marrying Kate and going to medical school. His life consists mostly of dating his secretaries and going to watch intense movies in hopes of escaping his monotonous life. Throughout much of the book, Binx contemplates many aspects and major questions of life which sometimes seem to drag on. Binx is very different from the typical person. The best times for him are what most would consider the worst. They involve events that intensify the moment such as a car wreck he experiences. A couple of times during his life, Binx decides he is tired of going through the daily motions of life and goes on a search. One of these times he was under a tree just as Buddha was under a tree when he was enlightened. During these times Binx is actually awake in the world and is filled with wonder and amazement of the wonderfully created universe and his own identity is made known to him. As the book goes on, Binx grows older and more mature and gradually escapes the everydayness of life, but not completely.
Rating:
Summary: Read Between the Lines
Review: In The Moviegoer the author uses development of the characters in such a way that almost anyone who reads this book can relate to them. They're not overly spectacular in anyway but instead your nice, regular, walk in the park type of people. The main character, Binx, has a motherly figure (his aunt) who expects him to do the best that he can do. He understands her old fashion ethics but will never accept them for himself. She tells him repeatedly to show his true self and be a doctor or research scientist, to do something of substance to make her proud. Eventually Binx realizes this is his calling and becomes a normal married doctor. But only after coming to the realization of a true identity, in which throughout his life was filled with movies and fake feelings of belonging. His identity had been repeatedly masked and he escaped through movies, and literally escaped in his car to the beach or just anywhere. The identity block was overcome when his cousin Kate wanted to escape to the big city life of the north and he realized he couldn't run forever, it was finally time to face himself and be all that he could be. Binx decides to face his identity and when he does this, all the malaise that he once saw was no more and the fright of the real world was lifted. Binx becomes himself and the reader can relate to this with little reading between the lines. This was an excellent inner theme book, written exquisitely. The book's strong points are its inner motives and meanings, although in my opinion the reading became a little monotonous after awhile. This is the reason for giving it just three stars. A good book, only if you look past the cover and don't just take it at face value. Try to understand it; this was just a very brief overview in which I tried to touch on it's inner themes of identity and search.
Rating: 
Summary: A MUST read book
Review: The book, The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy is a very interesting book that I recommend to young adults and adults. It had many different themes throughout the story that when explained, help you understand some complicated things in your own life. The basic plot of the story was about a guy named Binx, an average working guy. Binx had no mother or father and lived with his Aunt Emily who had all these different dreams for Binx when he grew up. And as Binx became older he never fulfilled his aunts hopes and dreams, he did what he thought was the right thing for him. Binx always fell in love with all his secretaries. He began to notice that all his love affairs with his secretaries always ended up the same. The relationships began to get old and boring and dies out just like the way life was beginning to appear to Binx. He thought that life had no point and had lost its wonder. Binx felt everyone was wondering through life lost with no real destination. Throughout the book he is on a mission to find the wonder in life. He goes on two different searches, Horizontal and Vertical Search. By the end of the book Binx never does actually find what he is looking for in life. He never finishes his searches and never really finds the wonder of life. He gives into his aunt's dreams and decides to go to medical school and marry the girl his aunt always told him would be a good girl to marry.
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: Absolutely Ridiculous
Review: From a technical standpoint, Percy fails on many levels to create original sentences and overwhelming beauty. While passages accomplish a slowly drifting sense of something Junoesque, the novel on the whole is a collection of mediocre authorship (how many times exactly will the moon swim, Mr. Percy?). As far as the story is concerned, this is one of the most tediously stretched plots ever created: it is in many ways laughable, unbelievable, and downright insulting to intelligence that Percy thinks people actually act this way. His failed pokes at being Camus or Dostoevsky do not help the situation. Percy attempts to throw out a great amount of information whose logic often seems flawed and that, most overwhelmingly, does not cohere into an interesting puddle of information. Most impressively dull are the contrived terms Binx invents for himself that seem to function only as some sort of springboard for classroom discussions and essay questions. For fans of true literature - the Lowrys, Nabokovs, Joyces, Prousts - I would advise a healthy retreat.
Rating:
Summary: Good.
Review: This booked grabbed me with in the first few pages. I loved Percy's voice in Binx and looked forward to the search. My only complaint is that for every one of Binx' priceless observations there were long, sometimes confusing passages which never seemed to pay off. However, the ending was so subtle and beautifully written that it more than made up it.
Rating:
Summary: If You Got To Ask, There Ain't No Use Explaining
Review: Book groups beware -- Alfred Knopf thought this book was the vilest trash; if you aren't aware of the possibility of the search, you may too. I've read ten or twenty thousand books in my life. Every two or three years I return to The Moviegoer. Unlike every other book of my youth, it's twice as wise as it was thirty years ago. Put Binx's book in my hand when it's time for me to go. Not for five minutes will I be distracted from the wonder.
Rating: 
Summary: A Contrary View
Review: My book group has a real problem with this book. Instead of celebrating Walker Percy's intellectualism, we felt that the storyline was vacuous and insipid. The characters were flat and seemed self absorbed and separated from the human condition. We couldn't feel anything for these people. Binx was totally devoid of passion, a disappointment to eager readers. Our dislike for the book did inspire a lot of discussion in search of any merit.
Rating:
Summary: Binx is cool!
Review: Binx is an extremely endearing character; his story and his "search" may not be universal (?), but they sure struck a chord with me.
Rating:
Summary: Searching is a full-time activity
Review: This review is less academic and far more personal. Having been born in Louisiana, having lived most my life in the U.S, having corresponded w/the author before he died, and now having lived five years in Nicaragua, Percy's novel has become even more compelling. The malaise that Binx and Kate experience definitely has nothing to do w/people who spend all their day finding food for themselves and their children. What I would hope, one day, to find in the customer reviews of those who have read The Moviegoer is that it has changed their lives: motivated them to look at the entire world around them -- and begin to change it for the better, even in little steps, as Binx does in his movement away from superficiality and the emptiness of acquiring "things." He moves away from money and commercialism to compassion and being able to take care of people. He moves from lust to love, from intellectualizing to a desire for genuine spirituality. That doesn't mean belonging to a church; it means belonging to the human race: all of it, in its various forms, no matter how different they seem. Percy was clearly interested in the inner growth of self, but he also cared about the world each "self" inhabits. One of his opinions was that the problem of hatred between whites and blacks in the U.S. may eventually lead to the country's downfall. Percy's ultimate message, through Binx, is the necessity for love ... however subtle that message may seem to be conveyed in the circuitous route Binx follows in his search. As it is for Binx, it is the challenge of every indidivual to conduct his own search: to begin solving problems not adding to them, to acquire humanity not its products. Nor can a reader expect the search to be "spelled out." Doing that destroys the integrity of the process, the engagement that is essential to continual exploration -- not simply to find things but to understand what and how life means.
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