The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Noonday Press, 1961
Man, I really wanted to get this book, to get into this book, but it just did nothing for me. Walker Percy’s novel of existential crisis set in New Orleans is often talked about in glowing terms by its fans. It seems to have the ability to put voice to a early-30s malaise, and many readers identify with this strongly. I would have thought I was prime material for this, but apparently not. So much of the writing struck me a unnecessarily and deliberately vague, though taken in small does, Percy’s prose is quite lucid. Yet there was nothing drawing me from page to page. Maybe I’m just an idjit, but I kept losing track of what was being talked about.
The plot is minimal–a few days in the life of Binx Bolling, a 30-year-old manager of a brokerage firm. He spends his days either visiting movie theaters, where he feel he can connect with the reality on screen more than real life, or taking one of his secretaries out in his MG for a bit o’ rumpy-pumpy down near the shoreline. There’s also his aunt who is ready with advice and comes from a distinguished family, and his cousin Kate, who suffers from some mental illness that is not entirely spelled out.
Along the way there are numerous diversions with a small cast of characters in an around New Orleans. I’m sorry to say, I’ve forgotten most of them.
Bolling has a brief revelation early on in the book–he sees through the dull surface of reality and tries to comprehend the true timeless state of the universe, and this is what sets him off on “the search”–the lifelong struggle to achieve that state again, to know that he’s onto “something.” I should have been fascinated by all this, or amused, but I was just unaffected. Better luck next time.