The Moviegoer

The book was inscribed with previous owners name and comments--I would not have bought the book had I know that. But since I only paid 17 dollars and some change it is not worth the trouble to send it back. R D

First novel by Louisiana Christian Existentialist author Walker Percy gives vivid portrait of young privileged stockbroker of New Orleans going thru life choices crisis ending with marriage and medical school (like Percy himself phaps)

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

Walker Percy was forty-six years old when his first published novel, "The Moviegoer", was awarded the National Book Award in 1962. It was, in some sense, the public beginning of the second half of Percy's life for, as Percy himself wrote in 1972: "Life is much stranger than art-and often more geometrical. My life breaks exactly in half: 1st half=growing up Southern and medical; 2nd half=imposing art on 1st half." But what, exactly, did Percy mean when he said this? In some sense, "The Moviegoer" is the beginning of an answer.Percy was born in 1915 and lived his early life in Birmingham, Alabama. His grandfather committed suicide when Walker was an infant and his father, too, committed suicide in 1929. Following his father's suicide, his mother moved Walker and his two brothers to Mississippi. Percy's family was one of the oldest families in the South and he and his brothers soon found a father figure in the form of his cousin, William Alexander Percy, known affectionately as Uncle Will. Three years after his father's suicide, Percy's life was again marked by tragedy when his mother's car went off a bridge, killing her and leaving Walker and his brothers in the charge of his Uncle Will. Percy went to medical school at Columbia University, where he contracted tuberculosis during his internship. In and out of sanitariums for several years, he finally returned to the South in his early 30s, getting married in 1946 and settling in the New Orleans area, where he lived the remainder of his life. It was at this time that Percy received an inheritance from his Uncle Will that allowed him to devote himself completely to his long-standing interest in literature and philosophy. I relate the biographical details because, as you read "The Moviegoer", it seems (not surprisingly) heavily marked by Percy's life experience, the author's biography being one point of reference for the novel. "The Moviegoer" is a peculiarly American and belated expression of the existential novel that had been so brilliantly articulated in France by Albert Camus. Like "The Stranger", Percy's novel focuses on meaning-in this case, the obsession of Binx Bolling, the novel's narrator, on what he calls the "search". As Bolling says at one point, "the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." And exactly what does this mean? "To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." An enigmatic definition, but one which makes the reader who spends time with "The Moviegoer", who reads the book carefully and reflectively, to think more deeply about his or her own life."The Moviegoer" is not a novel dominated by plot. At a superficial level, the novel relates, in a wry and matter-of-fact way, a few days in the seemingly unremarkable life of Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker whose main activities are going to the movies and carrying on with each of his suc

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.

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.