The Moviegoer

Rating:
Summary: A 20th century masterpiece
Review: This is a book that worms its way into your psyche and stays with you long after you've put it down. The details of its plot and characters aren't so important as the mood it evokes. Its atmosphere literally seeps into your pores. Recently named one of the 100 greatest 20th century novels, and with good reason. As fresh, funny, and relevant today as it was three decades ago.

Rating:
Summary: Modern apathy in a bottle
Review: Percy does an excellent job expressing what we all feel in a modern wealthy culture where our basic needs are not a daily issue. We suffer from a constant need for "newness" to keep us from feeling our lives are boring or meaningless. I almost find myself looking for percy's philosophy in his books rather than reading them carefully. They are a little tedious like Faulkner in that they do a lot of scenic description without a very quick moving plot. My only other complaint is that it seemed like he was rewriting a nicer version of Camus' The Stranger. I definitely agree with Walker rather than Camus about our hope in this world though.

Rating:
Summary: Understanding Binx
Review: Contrary to popular opinion, I did not find Binx'search incomprehensible. I think the closest word would be disassociation. I have felt the "malaise" often when trapped in a situation that reeks of meaninglessness. I feel it often when exiting a movie, for instance. Or at a political cocktail party (or any sort of cocktail party or funeral). Binx finds his malaise in all phases of his day, his life. At 30, that is not uncommon. We mistake it for boredom. It need not be "understood"; it will be felt and recognized by the primal being in all of us yearning to be authentic.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Greatest American Novels of the Twentieth Century
Review: The novel takes place over the course of one week, Mardi Gras week, in New Orleans, and concerns Binx Bolling, the eponymous moviegoer, who will turn thirty in the course of the novel. Binx is also the narrator of the novel, and it's his voice that gives the book its unique humor, irony, and poignance; a plot synopsis does not do justice to the complexity and compellingness of this influential novel. Binx, a dreamy stockbroker and scion of an old patriarchal New Orleans family, is (he tells us confidentially) on a search. The nature of Binx's search is only vaguely understood by the reader, but Binx himself seems to know exactly what he's talking about when he uses his own peculiar vocabulary to describe aspects of the search (words like "repetition" and "rotation" are specialized jargon in Binx's idiom, used to refer to specific phenomenon.) Percy's great achievement with this novel is handling the subtle variations of distance between the reader and Binx: Is he an entirely trustworthy narrator? Is he demented, dishonest, insane? Is he putting us on? Or does he distrust the reader? Does he know we're watching him? Binx slyly takes his part in the affairs of his family and community, all the while commenting sardonically on various aspects of modern American spirituality, all the while conducting his "search," which leads him to cross paths with his equally insane cousin, Kate, and to incur the wrath of his aristocratic old aunt. It's a very funny, very moving, ultimately heartbreaking book, for we are never sure what has become of Binx and his search. Was his spirit defeated, or does he merely withdraw to conduct his search further outside of the reader's eye? His and Kate's love story, if that's what it is, is tragic, and Binx himself might be a tragic figure--Percy complicates the question mightily. This is a great novel, my favorite of all novels, and it has influenced everyone from Larry McMurtry to Frederick Exley to charlatans like Richard Ford, whose "The Sportswriter" is a blatant ripoff of Percy's book. The cultural commentary of the novel (which was written in the fifties) could have been written yesterday; pay special attention to his aunt's stunning speech near the novel's end when she imperiously indicts the entire American value system. It's a glorious swan song and one of the best chewing-out scenes every written. If they tell me I can take one book to the moon with me, this is the book I'll take.

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: Go get this one
Review: 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. Also try Jackson McCrae's "Children's Corner" or his "Bark of the Dogwood" for equally great southern reads-intricate and haunting all of these.

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.


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: 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: 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?