The Moviegoer: a novel by Walker Percy

Once is enough, November 12, 2004***


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.