The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” The Moviegoer incarnates this quietly desperate life in the characters of Binx Bolling and Kate Cutrer. Bolling, a Korean war veteran has settled into a comfortable middle class existence defined by working in his uncles investment firm, alternating “improving” conversations with his aunt with sexual dalliances with his firm’s secretaries, and living his life through movies, which punctuate the narrative. Kate is the suicidal step-cousin, mentally unbalanced but the one person who understands Binx.
Percy narrates his main character’s life almost as if he were watching it, as well as the movies, go by. He seems detached from the women he meets. Sex is just a compensatory release. At one point he comments wistfully that he wishes for the day when it were still a forbidden thing, because then there would be the thrill. At one point, it is even just tiring work. His “quiet desperation” is a form of alienation and detachment, yet underneath, there is this longing for something more that triggers the culminating flight from New Orleans to Chicago with Kate.
The big question at the end is whether he has found what he is looking for. I’ll leave that for you to discover and decide. What Percy does in this National Book Award winner and first novel is hold up a mirror to our middle class dis-ease in a world where God seems dead or irrelevant.
This is one of two literary fiction reviews I’ll be posting today. Look for the second one shortly!