The Moviegoer [Paperback]

Walker Percy (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 14, 1998

Winner of the 1961 National Book Award

The 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

In a gentle Southern accent narrator Christopher Hurt delivers the story with a slow, lazy lilt which suits the text and evokes a pervading spiritual emptiness. --AudioFile

Clothed in originality, intelligence, and a fierce regard for man's fate. . . .Percy has a rare talent for making his people look and sound as though they were being seen and heard for the first time by anyone. --Time

Mr. Percy is a breathtakingly brilliant writer.--New York Times Book Review

A brilliant novel. . .Percy touches the rim of so many human mysteries. --Harper's --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 241 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage International ed edition (April 14, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375701966
• ISBN-13: 978-0375701962
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (157 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Walker Percy (1916-1990) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he was the oldest of three brothers in an established Southern family that contained both a Civil War hero and a U.S. senator. Acclaimed for his poetic style and moving depictions of the alienation of modern American culture, Percy was the bestselling author of six fiction titles--including the classic novel The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the National Book Award--and fifteen works of nonfiction. In 2005, Time magazine named The Moviegoer one of the best English-language books published since 1923.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

304 of 319 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book That Should Be Read . . . And Then Read Again June 10, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Walker Percy was forty-six years old when his first published novel, "The Moviegoer", was awarded the National Book Award in 1962. It was, in some sense, the public beginning of the second half of Percy's life for, as Percy himself wrote in 1972: "Life is much stranger than art-and often more geometrical. My life breaks exactly in half: 1st half=growing up Southern and medical; 2nd half=imposing art on 1st half." But what, exactly, did Percy mean when he said this? In some sense, "The Moviegoer" is the beginning of an answer.

Percy was born in 1915 and lived his early life in Birmingham, Alabama. His grandfather committed suicide when Walker was an infant and his father, too, committed suicide in 1929. Following his father's suicide, his mother moved Walker and his two brothers to Mississippi. Percy's family was one of the oldest families in the South and he and his brothers soon found a father figure in the form of his cousin, William Alexander Percy, known affectionately as Uncle Will. Three years after his father's suicide, Percy's life was again marked by tragedy when his mother's car went off a bridge, killing her and leaving Walker and his brothers in the charge of his Uncle Will.

Percy went to medical school at Columbia University, where he contracted tuberculosis during his internship. In and out of sanitariums for several years, he finally returned to the South in his early 30s, getting married in 1946 and settling in the New Orleans area, where he lived the remainder of his life. It was at this time that Percy received an inheritance from his Uncle Will that allowed him to devote himself completely to his long-standing interest in literature and philosophy....

I relate the biographical details because, as you read "The Moviegoer", it seems (not surprisingly) heavily marked by Percy's life experience, the author's biography being one point of reference for the novel.

"The Moviegoer" is a peculiarly American and belated expression of the existential novel that had been so brilliantly articulated in France by Albert Camus. Like "The Stranger", Percy's novel focuses on meaning-in this case, the obsession of Binx Bolling, the novel's narrator, on what he calls the "search". As Bolling says at one point, "the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." And exactly what does this mean? "To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." An enigmatic definition, but one which makes the reader who spends time with "The Moviegoer", who reads the book carefully and reflectively, to think more deeply about his or her own life.

"The Moviegoer" is not a novel dominated by plot. At a superficial level, the novel relates, in a wry and matter-of-fact way, a few days in the seemingly unremarkable life of Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker whose main activities are going to the movies and carrying on with each of his successive secretaries. "Once I thought of going into law or medicine or even pure science. I even dreamed of doing something great. But there is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings; selling stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quitting work at five o'clock like everyone else; having a girl and perhaps one day settling down and raising a flock of Marcias and Sandras and Lindas of my own."

What "The Moviegoer" suggests is resonant of Thoreau's contention that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. But it is a desperation that arises not from the ordinariness of everyday lives, but, rather, from the failure to transform that ordinariness through contemplation and self-reflection, through an appreciation for the mundane. Thus, in the book's epigraph, Percy quotes Kierkegaard: "the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." As Percy has suggested in another of his books, "Lost in the Cosmos" (a work of non-fiction subtitled "The Last Self-Help Book"), we inhabit a society of alienated and despairing "non-suicides" who Percy wanted to transform, through his writing, into "ex-suicides". In Binx Bolling's words: "For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of the sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death . . . At times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say."

"The Moviegoer" is a thoughtful and a thought-provoking book that should be read and then re-read, slowly and carefully, for every paragraph is laden with insight into the character of its narrator, the character of its author and, ultimately, the character of ourselves. Read more ›

57 of 60 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Searching is a full-time activity March 26, 2000

By Leslie A. Sullivan

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is less academic and far more personal. Having been born in Louisiana, having lived most my life in the U.S, having corresponded w/the author before he died, and now having lived five years in Nicaragua, Percy's novel has become even more compelling. The malaise that Binx and Kate experience definitely has nothing to do w/people who spend all their day finding food for themselves and their children. What I would hope, one day, to find in the customer reviews of those who have read The Moviegoer is that it has changed their lives: motivated them to look at the entire world around them -- and begin to change it for the better, even in little steps, as Binx does in his movement away from superficiality and the emptiness of acquiring "things." He moves away from money and commercialism to compassion and being able to take care of people. He moves from lust to love, from intellectualizing to a desire for genuine spirituality. That doesn't mean belonging to a church; it means belonging to the human race: all of it, in its various forms, no matter how different they seem. Percy was clearly interested in the inner growth of self, but he also cared about the world each "self" inhabits. One of his opinions was that the problem of hatred between whites and blacks in the U.S. may eventually lead to the country's downfall. Percy's ultimate message, through Binx, is the necessity for love ... however subtle that message may seem to be conveyed in the circuitous route Binx follows in his search. As it is for Binx, it is the challenge of every indidivual to conduct his own search: to begin solving problems not adding to them, to acquire humanity not its products. Nor can a reader expect the search to be "spelled out...." Doing that destroys the integrity of the process, the engagement that is essential to continual exploration -- not simply to find things but to understand what and how life means. Read more ›

61 of 68 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Greatest American Novels of the Twentieth Century August 12, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

The novel takes place over the course of one week, Mardi Gras week, in New Orleans, and concerns Binx Bolling, the eponymous moviegoer, who will turn thirty in the course of the novel.

Binx is also the narrator of the novel, and it's his voice that gives the book its unique humor, irony, and poignance; a plot synopsis does not do justice to the complexity and compellingness of this influential novel. Binx, a dreamy stockbroker and scion of an old patriarchal New Orleans family, is (he tells us confidentially) on a search. The nature of Binx's search is only vaguely understood by the reader, but Binx himself seems to know exactly what he's talking about when he uses his own peculiar vocabulary to describe aspects of the search (words like "repetition" and "rotation" are specialized jargon in Binx's idiom, used to refer to specific phenomenon.) Percy's great achievement with this novel is handling the subtle variations of distance between the reader and Binx: Is he an entirely trustworthy narrator? Is he demented, dishonest, insane? Is he putting us on? Or does he distrust the reader? Does he know we're watching him? Binx slyly takes his part in the affairs of his family and community, all the while commenting sardonically on various aspects of modern American spirituality, all the while conducting his "search," which leads him to cross paths with his equally insane cousin, Kate, and to incur the wrath of his aristocratic old aunt.

It's a very funny, very moving, ultimately heartbreaking book, for we are never sure what has become of Binx and his search. Was his spirit defeated, or does he merely withdraw to conduct his search further outside of the reader's eye?... His and Kate's love story, if that's what it is, is tragic, and Binx himself might be a tragic figure--Percy complicates the question mightily.

This is a great novel, my favorite of all novels, and it has influenced everyone from Larry McMurtry to Frederick Exley to charlatans like Richard Ford, whose "The Sportswriter" is a blatant ripoff of Percy's book. The cultural commentary of the novel (which was written in the fifties) could have been written yesterday; pay special attention to his aunt's stunning speech near the novel's end when she imperiously indicts the entire American value system. It's a glorious swan song and one of the best chewing-out scenes every written.

If they tell me I can take one book to the moon with me, this is the book I'll take. Read more ›