Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
is probably his best known work, and it was highly-praised from its first pressing in 1962. Though mostly plot-less, it follows a few month in the life of Binx Bolling, a stock broker and veteran of the Korean War who now lives a quiet life in suburban New Orleans. The book has been lauded for its use of philosophical issues, like existentialism, as a springboard for the internal conflict of the protagonist.
Like Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar, The Moviegoer is a first person “seeker” story in the tradition of post-war fiction. Most of the action takes place in Binx’s intellectual meanderings as he deals with family politics and his search for life’s ultimate meaning, if there really is one. It’s hard to tell what Bollings is really searching for — which may be Percy’s point — since he switches focus constantly, from his sexual conquests and “spinning on the Gulf coast” to explaining the history of his family or kicking the neighbor’s dog. As the title suggest, Binx tends to relate his seemingly disconnected experiences to movies he’s seen — kind of like that one guy you probably (but keep at a safe distance) know who knows every line from every “edgy” film or has a library filled only with Palahniuk and pop-philosophy books. Except Bolling is less annoying.
The most important character besides Binx is his cousin, Kate, who suffers from some pathology severe enough to warrant medication and a watchful eye from the family. After a certain event involving Binx and Kate that causes the family a great deal of concern and for which Binx enjoys culpability, he reacts with a weird, pacified indifference when confronted with guilt from his aunt. I see Kate as the physical embodiment of Binx’s nihilism-lite mania; there are times when she just kind of leads him on, entreating him with the carrot of loosed social or familial bonds and free-spiritedness. She acts as his guide in his search, freed from rationality, convention, and constructed meaning — though Percy shows Kate as the stable one and Binx the one in need of treatment (Kate: “You’re like me, but worse. Much worse.”).
Percy went on to write more critically-acclaimed novels but The Moviegoer has remained his strongest.