U.S. Census Book Club: The Moviegoer

Hmmmm...

It has been several months since I've read anything of real significance, a book that really has some meat to it. The Moviegoer is one of Time magazine's Top 100 novels of the 20th century, so that sounds prestigious right? It won the National Book Award in 1961. Again, very nifty, aye? Excerpts from the back cover: "In his portrait of a New Orleans stockbroker, wavering between ennui and the longing for redemption...", "On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is adrift." And that is the problem with this book, and any other book where the main character is "adrift". It lacks an anchor. The narrative wanders from moment to moment, but nothing really happens, and if it does, it has no lasting significance. My heart didn't really connect to the story. I'm not going to pretend that I understood everything in this novel. But I can understand why Walker Percy is considered such a gifted writer. He speaks of truth, we live in a society adrift, a culture where people identify more with Angelina Jolie than with their next door neighbor. But it is sort of a downer to read about that truth for 240 pages.

Walker Percy should have ended up like Ernest Hemingway. He was haunted by the fact that his grandfather, father and mother all comitted suicide. Percy loved reading Kierkegaard's existentialist philosophy and Dostoevsky's cheery novels. But the saving grace in Percy's life was a college roommate who rose early every morning to attend Daily Mass. Inspired by this example, Percy converted to Catholicism and decided to become a writer instead of a doctor, writing that he would study the pathology of the soul rather than that of the body.

I think this blogger writes a great essay on Percy so if you'd like to know more, read there. I like especially the quote he found about writers being like canaries in a coal mine. This helped me understand Percy a little better.

I'll leave you with some of the more sublime sentences from The Moviegoer, my dogeared pages.

p. 7 "I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, and all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deoderant. My armpits never stink."

p. 74 "I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see."

p. 162 "Lonnie takes his money with his pronged fingers and sets about putting it into his wallet, a bulky affair with an album of plastic envelopes filled with holy cards."

p. 215 "(I have observed that it is no longer possible for one young man to speak unwarily to another not known to him, except in certain sections of the South and the West, and certainly not with a book in his hand.)"

p. 240 "Only the two girls are sad, but they are also secretly proud of having caught onto the tragedy."