Prize Winning Classic. This novel won the National Book Award when it was released in 1962. It was a surprise winner, beating full-throated endorsements of the American dream Franny and Zooey, Revolutionary Road, and Catch-22. This writer makes the case that the fix was on but I think The Moviegoer won because of the happy ending. A sad ending would have been too unamerican to win a prize.
The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
The web tells me that Al Gore said his favorite book is The Red and the Black by Stendhal. But my memory – talk about an untrustworthy guide - tells me that in Gore’s last unfortunate bid for office the press had a high old time when Gore said his favorite book was The Moviegoer. Just goes to show how not like us plain folks Gore is, The Media gleefully implied, that he would like a novel narrated by a frivolous and disengaged loser.
Cute, very nice, and charming that The Media missed or disregarded the fact that the novel is by a writer committed to life, heartfelt and authentic. And I mean authentic in an existential sense. To live an authentic life means our feelings, thoughts, words, and actions are moderate, rational and in accord.
This novel is moody but light, as readable as existentialist novels like The Stranger, Those Barren Leaves, Norwegian Wood, Kokoro, and As I Lay Dying are usually not. I enjoyed reading The Moviegoer, though in some parts I chided the unreliable narrator “Okay, you’re in despair – I get it - it's not a helpful response to adversity.”
Thirty-year-old stockbroker and war veteran Jack “Binx” Bollings lives “tidily and ingeniously” in Gentilly, a suburb of New Orleans. After being wounded in combat in Korea, he has returned from the police action traumatized and stuck in despondency and disillusion that life seems so every day, so mediocre. He goes to movies during the day with other lonely escapists and leads a loose love life, walking an ethical tightrope by giving himself up to lasciviousness with his secretaries. Binx is so lost in sin – not for nothing is spiritual sloth one of the seven capital sins - that his voluntary don’t-care sadness makes him torporous even upon hearing his Aunt Emily’s sound advice:
I don’t know quite what we’re doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
Aunt Emily brings to mind doughty grannies and aunts in The Unvanquished and Satoris.
However, somebody does move Binx. Arousing his deepest feeling is his Aunt Emily's step-daughter, Kate Cutrer. Though Kate has bipolar disorder – she’s never more gorgeous and compelling than when in a manic episode - Binx sometimes imagines a life of stability for them, somehow.
The novel presents five episodes, all smooth movements as Binx ages from twenty-nine to thirty during Mardi Gras – of course since the story set in The Big Easy. The novel passes with few revelations though the heart-to-heart conversation with Lonnie Smith is very fine. Lonnie is Binx’s 14-year-old half-brother, terminally ill, debilitated in a wheelchair, and a devout Catholic that offers his suffering to God in reparation for other sinners. Lonnie is well-aware of his own approaching death due to any opportunistic pathogen spoiling to bully his weakened immune system. Lonnie prays for Binx’s soul when he takes communion. Who is to say intercessory prayer does not contribute to the ending of the novel in which Binx and Kate and the reader embrace the whole world, complete with a future, ready to be resilient?
Ending on a traditionally American can-do note, the novel is a good one to start a new year.
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