Book Review: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

By Daniel Dessinger

March 28, 2008

Walker Percy is supposed to be a "Southern" writer and he is so in many ways. But still there is more Kafka and Kierkegaard in him than Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, especially in this first novel that won him the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962.

"The Moviegoer" is the story of Binx Bolling, a well-to-do stock broker down in New Orleans with nothing much to worry about – at the surface. He is a well-educated, well-mannered 30 year old single man who enjoys going to the movies and serial-dating his secretaries.

However, deep down, Binx is working on a "research" project in which he tries to peel off the layers of social reality and deconstruct it down to its vacuous core. He is sensitive enough to realize the ultimate futility of the conventions and formulas surrounding him but not courageous (or foolish) enough to pay the price of total renunciation.

His worldly momentum propels him along a prosperous career and towards a sensible marriage worthy of his class and station in life. But his thirst for an "authentic life" is never quenched. His skepticism fans his inner monologue into a raging existentialist fire. Binx Bolling is a man torn in between the safe appearances and the untested promise that lies beyond them.

But this is not a philosophy textbook by any means. It's a literary delight packed with passages like the following:

"Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world."

And this is how Percy describes Chicago: "…a powdering of fall gold in the air, a trembling brightness that pierced to the heart, and the sadness of coming at last to the sea, the coming to the end of America. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North… This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground…"

Can Binx succeed in his "research" and arrive at uncompromising philosophical clarity? Can he become "liberated" while the conventional truths of his family and acquaintances keep pulling at his sleeves?

To provide the answer would be giving away the ending of this great novel which I won't do because it's not fair. Instead, I'll leave you with another sparkling passage from the book, one of unrelenting desperation and defiance:

"We live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology."