"Percy won the National Book Award in 1962 for this, his first published novel. Binx Bolling, a veteran of the Korean War, lives in the (fictitious) suburb of Gentilly, in Feliciana Parish, and works as a stockbroker in New Orleans. He daydreams, and carries on with his secretaries, one after another. And he goes to the movies, which are more real and carry more meaning for him than the rest of his life. If this is isn’t depression, it’s surely ennui. The plot of the novel, such as it is, follows this anti-hero’s “search” for meaning."
i've been re-reading percy's the moviegoer in conjunction w/augustine's confessions. as i remembered, they're a pretty good match. i noticed this back a decade or so, when i was still laboring w/the idea of graduate school & teaching. it's one of the things you learn to do, finding connections that aren't necessarily apparent. i knew that percy had used foundational stories for other novels(vide, faust & love in the ruins)kind of like flannery used heresies for hers.
way back when, the p'cola gang "discovered" writers like we did music. as i recall i found gaddis & lowry & joyce cary. mike introduced me to fred exley & walker percy. the first time i read the moviegoer(senior year of high school) it didn't strike me as much as it did five years later. it's gotten better w/every reading. i think it might be a perfect first novel. percy's own religious conversion hadn't hardened into proselytizing as it did in his later novels & his descriptions of city & landscapes were firing on all cylinders:
" evening is the best time in gentilly. there are not so many trees and the buildings are low and the world is all sky. the sky is a deep bright ocean full of light and life. a mare's tail of cirrus cloud stands in high from the gulf. high above the lake a broken vee of ibises points for the marshes; they go suddenly white as they fly into the tilting salient of sunlight. swifts find a windy middle reach of sky and come twittering down so fast i think at first the gnats have crossed my eyelids. in the last sector of the apple green a lockheed connie lowers from mobile, her running lights blinking in the dusk. station wagons and greyhounds and diesel rigs rumble toward the gulf coast, their fabulous tail-lights glowing like rubies in the darkening east."
every character in the novel, from the inconsequential to the crucial, is keenly drawn & felt. the book didn't feel like it had been written by a 45yo man. it felt fresh.in part, percy has given us a southern comedic version of sartre's nausea coupled w/the augustine's great narrative of spiritual awakening. augustine's narrator spends over 200 pages agonizing over what to do & how to do it(the second, post conversion part of the narrative consists of a deeply complex take on the meaning of time). while percy's narrator doesn't go to the extremes of augustine, he does have moments of palpable agony:
"today is my thirtieth birthday and i sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for kate and think of nothing. now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than i ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when i see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies---my only talent---smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientiful humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone...and men are dead dead dead; and the malaise has settled like fallout...on this my thirtieth birthday, i know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire."
when binx's moment happens just a page or two after that passage, it's near a school yard w/a symbol of the holy spirit within sight(augustine's moment is near a school yard & the sound of children's singing opens his eyes). he doesn't speak in tongues or fall to his knees or praise the lord. he, as augustine before him, simply realizes his way of living(lusting after the flesh)isn't working anymore. like a buddhist satori, god's grace doesn't transport anyone to heaven. it simply allows you to see more clearly. when percy wrote his novel about the end of the world, love in the ruins, the end was simply a re-arrangement of social/economic order. percy knows that a slight change in the weather can harbor deep significance.
critics mostly got the moviegoer wrong. it won prizes(hell, he beat out catch 22 & franny & zooey for the national book award in '62) but it really flew past most of the reviewers(the one i quote above isn't an exception). this is a subtle conversion story. that's thin ice for most folks in our modern world & it's easier to ignore it than consider its consequences. in the end, after "a dim dazzling trick of grace," binx has assumed the position of responsibility that his aunt had been in most of the novel & even expanded it to include his "brothers and sisters." whether he's a catholic is beside the point. his moment in the schoolyard has opened him to his place in the world.
this is the cover of the book i borrowed from mike. i'm not sure if i ever returned it. typical.
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