Review

The Moviegoer

By Walker Percy

Published by Methuen

1958: a New Orleans-born writer called Truman Capote published Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a light-hearted novel about New York playgirl Holly Golightly. Two years later, another southern writer, Walker Percy, published The Moveigoer, a study of a disillusioned and bored New Orleans man. The latter won the National Book Award, but it is the former that everyone remembers.

Yet The Moviegoer is every bit as deserving of praise as Capote’s work, especially given its influence on many American writers since. Gordon Burn has written about the similarities between the book and Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (Guardian), but others – John Cheever, Richard Yates, John Updike – made a specialty of dissecting the existential malaise that lay just below the surface of affluent post-war America.

Binx Bolling is almost thirty. He manages a branch office of his uncle’s brokerage firm in Gentilly, a suburb of New Orleans, and amuses himself by going to the movies and dallying with his secretaries. As a young boy he went to live with his aunt (really his great aunt) following the death of his father and his mother’s return to the hospital where she worked. A redoubtable southern belle, Binx’s aunt is disappointed in her nephew’s lack of ambition and employs him on occasion to look after his highly-strung cousin Kate.

Binx’s overwhelming trait is ambivalence. He knows he probably shouldn’t have affairs with his secretaries, but goes ahead anyway, losing interest almost as soon as they submit. He plays along with his aunt’s banter and schemes, but readily admits to Kate when he has been charged to watch out for her (she knows anyway). He has lost interest in having friends and can barely be bothered to converse with acquaintances in the street. In short, he tries to live as easy a life as possible.

However, the quiet life Binx has built for himself is disturbed at the beginning of The Moveigoer and affects him throughout the book. ‘This morning, for the first time in years, there occurred to me the possibility of a search.’ He goes on, ‘Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?’ As Binx pursues his search for meaning, he is drawn further into Kate’s feud with her stepmother (his aunt).

Walker Percy’s extraordinary book has something of The Great Gatsby’s beautiful world-weariness of tone, but also its humour. Binx is floating through life in a kind of numbed existential haze, and the people around him have expectations of him that he has no intention of fulfilling. As he says, ‘it is not a bad life at all,’ but is this really a substantial enough code to live by?

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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