The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
Summary
Binx Bolling is twenty nine, a stockbroker in the Gentilly suburb of New Orleans, good at his work, pleasant with everyone, quietly seeing his secretaries, and entirely absent from his own life. What he actually does is go to the movies, where things seem realer than his days, and pursue what he privately calls the search, which he can define only by its opposite: everydayness, the malaise, the possibility of coming to the end of a well managed life and discovering nobody was there.
The novel is one Mardi Gras week. Binx's Aunt Emily, the family's last Roman matriarch, summons him toward the seriousness she expects of him, medicine, duty, the family style, and assigns him to look after his cousin Kate, who is brilliant, unstable, recently bereaved of a fiancé and given to disappearing chemically from her own distress. Binx and Kate recognise each other the way two people standing outside the same window do, and their tentative, half accidental joining, including a train trip to Chicago that scandalises the family, is the closest thing the book has to a plot.
Percy writes it in a first person of enormous charm, comic, precise, Southern and haunted, with Kierkegaard folded so lightly into the New Orleans texture that the philosophy never once announces itself. The city itself, the Gulf light, the buses, the neighbourhood movie houses Binx grades like wines, is rendered with a documentary affection that makes the despair harder to dismiss.
Around two hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the modern condition diagnosed in the gentlest possible voice, and who suspect that despair can wear a seersucker suit.
Historical Context & Significance
The Moviegoer won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962 in the prize's most storied upset: Knopf had barely promoted the first novel, and the judges found it anyway. How they found it is prize folklore involving A. J. Liebling, who came across the book through his fascination with Louisiana, and his wife Jean Stafford, who sat on the panel; the award made Walker Percy's name overnight. Time and the Modern Library have both since ranked it among the century's best novels.
Percy came to fiction by the strangest road in Southern letters: a physician who contracted tuberculosis at the autopsy table, he spent his sanatorium years reading Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and the existentialists, converted to Catholicism, and abandoned medicine to write philosophical novels disguised as light Southern comedies. The family he came from, distinguished and suicide haunted, is transposed into Binx's with an intimacy the biography makes plain.
Five more novels followed, The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins the best known, but the first remains the perfect one, and its vocabulary, the search, the malaise, everydayness, has entered the language of readers who have never heard of Kierkegaard.