(Current fiction and quality fiction of the past.)
“The Moviegoer” (Vintage) by Walter Percy is considered a genuine American classic and was among the 100 best novels selected by the editors of Time magazine. That selection was considerably before Time’s awkward waltz with Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” an over-hyped nothing if there ever was, according to Examiner’s review and other literary detractors.
“The Moviegoer” won the 1962 National Book Award (although the publisher wrongly states it was the 1961 award). The 1961 ward went to Conrad Richter for “The Waters of Kronos,” according to the National Book Foundation.
“The Moviegoer” became the dazzling novel that established Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature with a story intertwined with the magic of New Orleans.
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 30th birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life, according to the publisher. 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, Examiner re-read “The Moviegoer” recently and highly recommends it.
Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1937, and became a Doctor of Medicine at Columbia in 1941. “The Moviegoer” was his first novel. Percy's other novels include “The Last Gentleman” (1966), “Love in the Ruins” (1971), “Lancelot” (1977), “The Second Coming” (1980), and “The Thanatos Syndrome” (1987), and two volumes of essays, “The Message in the Bottle” (1975) and “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book” (1983). Walker Percy died in 1990.
Examiner agrees with one reviewer that “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.” Some times its funny and often Examiner found it a bit more serious. For example, 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 year (1962) in which the novel earned the National Book Award was stacked with truly competitive nominations, including these finalists: Hortense Calisher – “False Entry”; George P. Elliott – “Among the Dangs”; Joseph Heller – “Catch-22”; Bernard Malamud – “A New Life”; William Maxwell – “The Chateau”; J.D. Salinger – “Franny and Zooey”; Isaac Bashevis Singer – “The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories”; Edward Lewis Wallant – “The Pawnbroker”; Joan Williams – “The Morning and the Evening”; and Richard Yates – “Revolutionary Road.”
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