The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Walker PercyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-04-14
ISBN: 0375701966
Number of pages: 241
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780375701962
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Moviegoer
Book Review: Tasted It Like Okra
Summary: 5 Stars
The Moviegoer is a novel about an angst-filled young man, who is on the verge of turning 30. Like The Rum Diary : A Novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, and The Sun Also Rises, it is a novel that focuses on a protagonist who is floundering, lost in life, searching for meaning.
The Moviegoer's protagonist is Binx Bolling, a stock broker whom lives in the New Orleans' suburb of Gentilly.
This, Percy's first novel, is an existential tract- a descendant of the work of Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marcel. The Moviegoer brought existentialism across the Atlantic, and gave it an American, southern charm.
While The Moviegoer is a weighty philosophical text, it is ironically also a celebration of the novel form (for in a Wittgenstein-like conclusion, Percy- the essayist and philosopher- in writing The Moviegoer turned to the novel to espouse his views). Percy had reached the limits of where the elusive and technocratic language of philosophy could take him. In this way, The Moviegoer is a proclamation that it is the novel, art rather than science, which is immortal. Only art could take Percy's ideas to a place philosophy could not.
And in The Moviegoer, Percy makes his reader wonder why it took the author so long to adopt a form in which he displays the genius of a master craftsman. Like in the passage where Binx describes his insomniac father as, "blundering through the patio furniture, the Junior Jets and the Lone Ranger pup tents, dragging his Saskatchewan sleeping bag like the corpse of a dead hope." Or like when Percy evokes the sad majesty of a city evening: "Station wagons and Greyhounds and diesel rigs rumble toward the Gulf Coast, their fabulous tail-lights glowing like rubies in the darkening east."
Percy's evocation of the evening hour reminded me of walking the streets of Amsterdam, when the inhabitants of the tall apartments along the "Gentlemen's Canal" have yet to draw their apartment's curtains, and light pours out of their apartment and reflects on the old streets and the dark surface of the canal. That brief moment of time when the day teeters on the edge of total darkness, and radiates with an autumnal brilliance.
At its core, Percy's prose is also inescapably southern. Unlike William Faulkner's south, though, Percy's south is more localized. "Yet it was here in the Tivoli that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra." Here Percy serves up a characteristic synesthesia, blending in his own marvelous way- abstract philosophy with grimy, tasty, tangible Creole food. Faulkner's south is the mystical "Yoknapatawpha County", which is southern, but non-specific; Percy presents a New Orleans we all know and can touch and taste.
Binx Bolling is an existential wanderer, alienated from the herds. It is in the herds that Binx sees the manifestation of humanity's worst sins: boredom. For Binx, worse than death is a certain death-in-life, wherein people speak like mindless "automatons", repeating rather than choosing their words. To the soul-searcher philosopher, such people locked in "everydayness" are worse than dead, for it is "everydayness" that mocks the moviegoer.
Binx finds the world romantic, entrancing, teeming. But everydayness, repetition and routine, pull Binx down into a vortex of "malaise". As a seer, though, Binx is able to intermittently jump out of the vortex to contemplate "the strange fact of one's own invincible apathy". Binx despises the clueless and willfully blind, all of whom have succumbed to Binx's sworn enemy of everydayness. The death-in-life of the herd tortures Binx, but it is ultimately through this awareness- tortuous as it may be- that Binx finds his only chance at flight to a better, more complete place.
Binx is the anti-hero Percy had previously tried to anoint indirectly through his philosophy's central ideas. That is- Binx is the moviegoer. A moviegoer is someone like Binx, who is apolitical, agnostic, despises everydayness, embraces pain and disaster as a way out of malaise, loves movies and art because they are unpredictable and new life forms. Anything new and beyond expectation is to Binx life-giving.
Finally, Binx is a disciple of Socrates, Jesus, and Buddha. "There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world..." The only recourse for the existentialist is to stare in fascination at the world. To realize with each thing that they learn, the body of what they don't know only grows and grows.
The existentialist (i.e. the moviegoer) stands removed from and in awe of moments that shock the routine of everydayness. From this vantage point, the moviegoer watches and questions.
And the moviegoer admires above all the moviemaker, whom bravely is able to escape the rat race- and evoke the world in all its beauty.
Summary of The Moviegoer
Winner of the 1961 National Book AwardThe dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback.
The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.
This elegantly written account of a young man's search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it) by taking a leap of faith and quite literally embracing what only seems irrational.
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