Walker Percy is not a writer you’re probably familiar with. The book The Moviegoer is his most celebrated work and it won the National Book Award in 1962. Yet, even as an English major in college I had never heard of this author. Not until my last semester in graduate school when I took a course from a professor who wrote Percy’s biography did I develop an interest in reading this book. And finally, I have gotten to it.
The Moviegoer transports the reader to 1940’s New Orleans just prior to Mardi Gras. Jack “Binx” Bolling is a bond salesmen who had a terrible experience in the Korean War and has a difficult time having normal conversations and building relationships. He is a man searching something in his life even though he has no idea what he is searching for, and he escapes his world by going to the movies. One of his biggest conflicts his dealing with his Aunt Emily, who is wealthy and played a large role in his upbringing, and her desire for him to attend medical school. He also shows love for his mother, who is poor and lives on the gulf coast with a new husband and Binx’s six half siblings.
This book is not something to read lightly. Percy is a southern writer cut from the same mold as a Flannery O’Conner and William Faulkner. His sentences read like something you would expect from a 19th century British author. His sentences are proper and lack any hint of American southern drawl, which I find disappointing.
At the beginning, I thought I was about to immerse myself in an existential masterpiece the likes of The Cather in the Rye. Instead, what I discovered was a drawn out, uneventful look into the life of a 3o-year-old man struggling to deal with his complex family, his career, and nightmarish recollections of his near death experience in the Korean War.
I felt this novel lacked muster and anything really captivating. I didn’t feel connected with New Orleans or Mardia Gras because I couldn’t hear the characters accents or visualize the colorful, musical event that I know it to be. Percy easily captures the emptiness inside Binx, and his disconnection from society.
By the end, I felt this book fell flat and didn’t provide what I would call “a purpose” for it all. I pitied Binx and his cousin Kate, who we learn is very unstable. Percy gives us little excitement, with the only minutely exciting part coming when Kate and Binx go to Chicago. What you would expect to be a sort of freeing time in both Kate and Binx’s young lives ends with having to answer difficult questions about decision-making and responsibility from Aunt Emily. Percy enters us into this mundane world of an adult man with no idea what he is to do with his life. It is an empty story, with no hope, or sadness or joy. It merely exists.
But in a way I guess that’s the brilliance of the book. For, as most us know, life is never like the movies.
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