The Moviegoer

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: 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 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: 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: 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.