The Moviegoer

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He takes his title from Percy, who asserts that we are all aliens in this world, meant for another world. Yet, fifty years after Percy diagnosed the feeling of displacement, Americans are still searching. The Moviegoer is a great novel, but I would have to rank All the King's Men higher, as it also deal with the great American theme of the "search" and set in the South I also would put Confederacy of Dunces above the Moviegoer just out of pure laughs. These human signposts or saints are absent in the later novels. More devious even than S[oren] K[ierkegaard]". Their fictional worlds are strange lands so without a point in the right direction, the reader is likely to get lost.

The Moviegoer is not my favorite of the Percy oeuvre that would be The Last Gentleman , but I am not picking my favorite books. If I were, I would also include Confederacy of Dunces because it is one of the funniest books I've read to date! However, I think The Moviegoer occupies a unique place in American literature. While it's not as epic as Warren's All the King's Men, it accomplishes more by uniting European existentialism, Southern Stoicism, Catholicism, and Twain's satiricism I was going for several isms here in a story that all at once comments on American culture, history, and individual identity.

It's dialogic and polyphonic in the style of Dostoevsky without being overly dark or too spiritually intense. Of all of Percy's novel, it's the most relatable and the least likely to get readers lost. My dissertation explored the theological connections between Dostoevsky and Flannery O'Connor and was directed by Ralph Wood.

Currently, I'm researching Dostoevsky's connections to other Southern writers, including Walker Percy and Carson McCullers, to produce a book-length manuscript. I teach courses that support my research, including Southern literature, Totalitarinism and literature, and American literature survey courses. Overview Blog Teaching Resources. View all 5 comments. Jan 28, Rachel rated it did not like it Shelves: I couldn't get through this book.

But really, I think the same way about this as I do books like Emma-- As in, why do I care if rich idiots are sad about their affluent lifestyle that is free of any socio-economic or actual danger? Oh, poor rich white middle-aged depressed man, who makes a lot of money, is breathlessly racist and sexist, and spends all his time manuvering to get his secretaries into bed.

Ge I couldn't get through this book. View all 14 comments. Aug 21, Lawyer rated it really liked it Recommends it for: For those in the mood for a bit of the blues. Recommended to Lawyer by: And, if Binx Bolling is there to see it, I wonder if he'll recognize himself. Not in the mood for a little Cam The Moviegoer: Not in the mood for a little Camus? No Jean Paul Sartre?

Well, "The Moviegoer" probably won't be your cup of tea either.

It's existentialism Southern style, starring Binx Bolling a member of the well bred Bolling clan from Felicianas Parish, you know, Audobon's Happy Land, where America's best known ornithologist killed his specimens in order to paint them, and for some reason was dismissed more than once by well bred families whose daughters he was tutoring, or something or other. It's not that Binx hasn't had significant events occur in his life that made him wonder what's it all about.

After all, his father, committed suicide. Then there was that nasty little police action in Korea, during which he and his squad got caught in a tangle of barbed wire while being surrounded by Red Chinese troops blowing those bugles. It's all a bit disturbing. After his excursion to the Orient, Binx heads home to New Orleans, where the family has now settled.

Strong willed Aunt Emily who has served as his guardian sends Binx off to college, sure that he has a purpose filled life ahead of him. However, Binx, the classic fraternity man, drifts through college without obtaining a single honor. Binx settles into professional life as a small time stockbroker in New Orleans. Although he is welcome to live in the family home in The Garden District, he kicks over the old family traces and rents an apartment in the Gentilly district, filled with Arts and Crafts bungalows and raised cottages. Our anti-hero is much happier sitting in a darkened theater, content to while away his time watching the flickering images on the screen.

He studies the movements and gestures of Gregory Peck and has Akim Tamaroff down to a tee.

Catching William Holden strolling through the French Quarter is a highlight of one particular day in his life. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man. Being a stockbroker requires a secretary. He has a string of them all named either Linda or Marcia.

Acting Gregory Peckerish, Binx is quite adept at bedding his secretaries who have the essential interchangeable body parts along with their interchangeable names. However, brief moments of happiness only turn into a general malaise. Binx is on some indefinable Search for some indefinable purpose.

After all, if one is not on to something, one is in despair. Kierkegaard had a few things to say about that. The action in "The Moviegoer" takes place during one week of Mardi Gras, when the entire city takes on an identity of its own, giving the novel a background of the absurd. During that week, Aunt Emily will attempt to persuade Binx, about to turn thirty, to consider going to medical school. She will pay all expenses. He will have the studio behind the house with total privacy to pursue what she offers as a purpose filled life.

Is this the end of Binx's Search? There is the complication of cousin Kate, Binx's female counterpart to whom he proposes marriage. She, too, is on her own Search, having lost her college love in a car wreck years ago, lost in despair and depression with a predilection for a hand full of Nembutal. While half-heartedly wooing Kate, Binx is pursuing his latest secretary, Sharon. All in all, Binx is a bit of a cad, seeking the momentary pleasure as opposed to a lasting pleasure filled life. However, it is a masterpiece of loneliness that each of us has experienced at some point in our lives.

Brilliantly written, this is a novel that deserved the National Book Award given in I think I'll break out the booze and have a ball. Perhaps I should make that a Bloody Mary. Save this one for a rainy day Monday. Don't they always get you down? View all 4 comments. Dec 19, Steve rated it really liked it. All hail the Biblioracle, for his powers are immense. I realize that many of you will not be acquainted with this prophet of proper book choices.

Anyway, I submitted my own list, cheating just a little by including only the ones I really liked, and waited to see what the man with the oracular gift would suggest. When I explained this in a mail, he graciously conjured up another one for me. I can see why he chose it after I mentioned Stegner. He returned home as a wounded war vet and settled into a relatively successful job as a stockbroker in New Orleans.

His passions in life are movies had you guessed? But is it enough? He must have wanted us to speculate. Though there were tangible elements to it a possible change in career in line with his aptitude for medical research, for one, or a good mate to share his life with, for another , the bulk of his searching was more abstract.

Lines like this hint at a moral or spiritual dimension: My mother's family think I have lost my faith and they pray for me to recover it. On the other side of the ledger lies a pretty profound Weltschmerz. It was a theme with heft to spare. Had that been all there was, it might have seemed a tad ponderous. Percy may have sensed that, knowing to provide lighter fare as sides. Occasional humor helped the cause. And like many from the South, his language was rich and entertaining. Speaking of characters, there was a wealth of good ones beyond Binx and New Orleans. One was his aunt, a woman of rare insight and suasion.

Such plot as there was had Binx and Kate driving. Four very solid stars. View all 51 comments. Oct 21, LeAnne rated it really liked it. It is also the annual weekend of his memorial literary fest in St Francisville. I feel lucky to live where we do. Beautiful sentiments by the sculptor - he was actually friends with Percy It's been too many years since I read this to comment on details but I've got a warning and a betcha-never-knew-this piece of trivia.

First, I would warn new readers that the book is a time capsule. In order to truly appreciate it, one has to consider how women and minorities were treated half a century ago well, or in Hollywood like last year.. Patting a woman's rump isn't going to win any admiration from today's society, but as far as historical accuracy goes, you'll get a taste of it here. Now, there are scads of reviews of this terrific book out there and all of them penned by readers far more eloquent than me.

But here's the tidbit you may not see anywhere else! For those who have sampled the outstanding books written by Ron Rash , you will recall that small little actions of his characters speak volumes of unspoken or unwritten words. In one of my favorite novels by Rash, a character walks into the s board room of a timber camp office. It is luxurious as only a space can be amidst mud caked shanties and a decimated forest, now razed for its timber. There is serious money - a fortune in these virgin trees. As one feline predator of a woman strides in - her name is Serena - she spies the massive meeting table in the center of the room.

It is a solid slab of one single behemoth tree. Serena leans over and slowly glides her hand over this conquered wood and practically purrs. I was doing an author chat with Ron Rash regarding this dark masterpiece of his and noted something really unusual to him. By sheer coincidence, I'd been reading The Movie Goer the week prior to our author dial-in, and holy slabbed trees, Batman! When The Movie Goer's Binx walks into an uptown Garden District home, of all the gorgeous and ornate furnishings, he singles out only a beautiful table to admire. Its top is made of one solitary slab of a massive tree.

He slides his hand along it, reveling in the luxury. My question to Rash was - did slabbed tables at one time define affluence? Ron Rash was thrilled to hear my little parallel discovery! It turns out that he did his doctoral dissertation on Walker Percy. That fawning hand-slide in Serena was an homage - an Easter Egg! Nobody had ever noticed it before! Now you too are in on the secret. Mar 26, Perry rated it really liked it Shelves: Southern Existentialism New Orleans is both intimately related to the South and yet in a real sense cut adrift not only from the South but the rest of Louisiana A proper enough American city and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.

Walker Percy I love this Percy quote because he so aptly captures the essence of this city below sea level, affectionately known as The Big Easy. Walker Percy was awarded the National Book Award Southern Existentialism New Orleans is both intimately related to the South and yet in a real sense cut adrift not only from the South but the rest of Louisiana Walker Percy was awarded the National Book Award for this novel--his first novel--centered on Binx Bolling, a detached and depressive thirty-year-old stockbroker in New Orleans, and his quest for purpose and redemption, through movies and literature until, finally, he makes life-altering discoveries in life during the week of Mardi Gras.

In it, Percy explores ideas of cultural and spiritual alienation with a light lyrical tone while drawing on elements of Dante by paralleling his life to that of the Divine Comedy's narrator. Binx's aunt asks him to watch over his suicidal female cousin during the Mardi Gras season. Binx describes his life in terms of the aesthetic, religious and ethical, in his search for meaning and spiritual redemption. He constantly daydreams, cannot maintain sexual relationships and finds more meaning and urgency in movies and books than in his own humdrum life.

He reflects on race and class as he wanders the streets of the French Quarter and travels along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, reflecting on the people and things he encounters, as he provides numerous elegant descriptions of Southern landscapes and an enlightened Southerner's perspective on escaping, for the most part, the legacy of the Old South. What is the nature of the search? Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

May 22, Daniel rated it liked it Shelves: I come away from "The Moviegoer" with very mixed feelings. Walker Percy was a beautiful writer, and I found myself reading several passages more than once just to enjoy the language, but I think I may be too old, even at 35, to truly appreciate and connect with a novel driven almost completely by existential feelings. It's not that I never personally feel existential dread -- I do, far more often than I'd like -- but, for the most part, I got the reading of these types of novels out of my system I come away from "The Moviegoer" with very mixed feelings.

It's not that I never personally feel existential dread -- I do, far more often than I'd like -- but, for the most part, I got the reading of these types of novels out of my system as a teenager.

That's when I read Camus's "The Stranger," for instance. I probably should have read about Binx Bolling's search for meaning in the modern world back then. What's weird about that is that I'm now far closer to both Binx's age and place in life than I was as a teenager. And maybe that's the problem.

Perhaps these kinds of books are meant to prepare us for where we will be later in life -- or even allow us to say to ourselves, full of self-righteousness, "I'll never be like that! Maybe it's just too much to take, hitting us too close to where we live now. That all being said, I want to go back to my first point: This passage, from after Binx tries unsuccessfully to consummate an affair -- the mind was willing, but the flesh wasn't -- is just one example: I never worked so hard in my life, Rory.

I had no choice: Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human Look at us, Binx -- my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me -- we're sinning!

We're human after all! It'd be hard to argue with Binx on that point. View all 10 comments. Mar 10, Bram rated it really liked it Shelves: I'm a sucker for books that employ existential musings in a way that feels genuine and unforced; thus, I greatly enjoyed The Moviegoer.

Editorial Reviews

It's an ambitious novel for one so slim--it skims many weighty topics, from hedonism and his better-dressed twin, capitalism , to religion's place in America, to the nature of responsibility and that of her incubus, apathy , to mental health and paranoia. There is even a nice riff on Salinger where Percy replaces Holden's "phonies" with those who are "dead" in I'm a sucker for books that employ existential musings in a way that feels genuine and unforced; thus, I greatly enjoyed The Moviegoer. There is even a nice riff on Salinger where Percy replaces Holden's "phonies" with those who are "dead" in their hollow interpersonal interactions.

While I was occasionally disappointed at Percy's hesitation to explore some issues more fully, it is this deft reticence that ultimately provides the book with such poignant and unique flair. Just as Nick's reliability as a narrator in The Great Gatsby is at times questionable, Binx's own truthfulness or at least his self-perception is occasionally suspect.

He professes to be apathetic and lazy despite great success with his financial work, and the only thing that motivates him more urgently than his day-job is his highly successful womanizing career. He goes on and on about his metaphysical "search" and listens faithfully to religious broadcasts while concurrently claiming an inability to consider questions about God, existence, or the relevance of such questions even if the answers are in favor of belief.

And while maintaining that his actions come only from selfish impulse, Binx is exceptionally generous with those whose needs he can, at least temporarily, fulfill i. Kate, Lonnie, and even Aunt Emily. In the end these contradictions serve primarily to accentuate Binx's Dostoevskyan duality--and, therefore, his humanity. Despite the absence of any inner resolutions for the lead characters, Percy still manages to provide a modestly uplifting message via his unrelenting focus on the malaise associated with "everydayness".

It is this heightened perception of the malaise that ultimately allows one to at least recognize the road that can lead to despair--to emotional and moral flaccidity. As the novel's epigraph, quoting Kierkegaard, explains: View all 9 comments. Sep 19, Megan Baxter rated it really liked it. Let me preface this by saying that I'm quite sure that nothing in this review will come close to equalling the great one Jeffrey Keeten did, which I am purposely not rereading until after I write this, as it will intimidate the heck out of me. The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement.

You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook. View all 13 comments. Oct 31, Katie rated it did not like it. Nothing like a boring book to put a damper on reading. I can't remember the exact day that I started this book, but it feels like forever ago. For a some page book, it felt like a page book, and just dragged on for a long time. The main character Binx Bolling who names their kid Binx?

In the book, there's about five interesting events, six entertaining converstations, Nothing like a boring book to put a damper on reading. In the book, there's about five interesting events, six entertaining converstations, three unique ideas, and the rest, just boring ramble inside Binx's head.

The title of the book, implies that Binx sees a lot of movies, but really I think he sees maybe three or four. I think that I'd recommend skipping the book, and going to see a movie instead. So, I read it. I guess it kind of redeems itself towards the end, but for much of the first pages or so, it was filled with sickening Southern witticisms and references to by-gone nonsense.

Too much about the "malaise" and the "genie-soul" - which means what exactly? And, what kind of grandiose shit is this? When I was a junior in high school, my favorite English teacher told us about Walker Percy. He lived across Lake Pontchartrain, she said, and she made him sound like a reclusive eccentric.

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He had a new book out, she told us, called Lancelot and highly recommended his Love in the Ruins. We didn't read him in class, but I heard enough about him to be intrigued and I read him on my own. Though my teacher had introduced me to him, I felt like he was my own discovery. I don't remember the first time I When I was a junior in high school, my favorite English teacher told us about Walker Percy. I don't remember the first time I read this, his first novel, but I think the second time was with a group at a local bookstore in the mids.

I remember the group's moderator, the owner of the store, saying that all through her reading, she wondered why she was bothering, until she got to the end. I believe I read it next with a small Yahoo group of women I had been online friends with for awhile earlys and I remember their strong reaction to Aunt Emily's speech near the end. I read it this time because my daughter had been wanting to read it with me for years, ever since she didn't get a chance to take a New Orleans Lit class at the local university before graduating, and we finally found the opportunity.

Every time I reread a Percy novel, I am struck by his prescience I especially felt that way after rereading Love in the Ruins after Hurricane Katrina , or maybe it's just that nothing much has changed in the world from then to now and, like Binx, Percy was an astute observer. I also appreciated this novel's humor more this time around, especially its depiction of the exclusive echelon inhabiting the Garden District of uptown New Orleans.

Perhaps this book should be rated 4 stars, but I'm in agreement with the bookstore owner about the ending and I'm on record elsewhere saying an ending can make a novel for me. There was so much I'd forgotten in between this read and the one before, but not the ending--that I remembered. And then there's that power of discovery I don't know what I was expecting, a nostalgic trip through the golden hours of cinema history, something along the lines of Truffaut or of the more recent Oscar laureate The Artist?

I didn't even pay attention to the year of publication or the setting New Orleans. Mostly the impulse to pick it up came from a goodreads review full of great movie posters, and I was looking for something to validate my own obsession with the silver screen magic I had periods when I watched movies I don't know what I was expecting, a nostalgic trip through the golden hours of cinema history, something along the lines of Truffaut or of the more recent Oscar laureate The Artist?

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Mostly the impulse to pick it up came from a goodreads review full of great movie posters, and I was looking for something to validate my own obsession with the silver screen magic I had periods when I watched movies per day. The actual novel surprised me in many ways, mostly in good ways, but turned out to be completely different from what I imagined and from what the opening chapter promises.

John Bickerson Bolling, aka Binx, is indeed a kindred spirit, a loner with a passion for the larger than life dramas produced in Holywood's dream factories: Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. Going to the movies is as natural and as necessary to him as eating or breathing: The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Joining Binx on his leisurely walks through a sleepy neighborhood in the hour before dawn, or strolling down Bourbon Street trying to spot a famous actor William Holden mixing with the public, maintaining his cool, detached demeanour with friends and family, I was too quick in judging him a more amiable, laid back version of Ignatius J Reilly: Binx is an entirely different kind of character.

His eyes are wide open instead of turned inward, his mind sharp and focused instead of delusional, his business flair excellent, his social skills almost flawlessly those of a classic Southern gentilhomme, his heart is in the right place, always ready to lend an attentive ear or a helping hand to siblings or casual acquaintances: I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.

When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see. I wouldn't want to give the impression Binx is an innocent, an angel of grace and understanding. He's a self confessed womanizer, and some of the funniest moments in the book detail his slick technique for serially seducing his secretaries, relying on his two-seater MG sportcar and the romantic appeal of a secluded Gulf Coast beach.

Since I mentioned the novel's heady mix of humor, despair and acurate social observations, here's a passage that I think remains as relevant today as in the day it was written: Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals.

Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside-down: Behind all the women and the sparkling movie idols Binx carries a deep seated despair, a malaise worthy of the pen of Baudelaire or Emil Cioran.

He is a man in the middle of an existential crisis, exasperated by the waste of precious moments in trivial pursuits and by the insufficiency of words to capture the essence of life. In his own words, he is a searcher, always looking for answers to ellusive questions. What is the malaise? The malaise is the pain of loss. After experiencing a personal moment of transcendent illumination while lying wounded in a foreign war, Binx can no longer be satisfied to be 'anyone, anywhere' , lost in the tedious 'everydayness' of common survival.

He finds the big cities of the North particularly repulsive in their dehumanizing industriousness and soul crushing agglomeration: The only person to understand him and his torment, is his cousin Katie, an extraordinary character in the great tradition of Southern literature. Katie may also hold the key to Binx redemption and reintegration into the human race that he no longer feels a part of, by giving him a sense of purpose and by sharing the burden between them.

Other memorable characters in the novel can be presented wholesale in the form of the two extended families that Binx is part of: His little brother Lenny is another memorable Southern staple, reminding me, among other things, of Forest Gump or Deliverance. Lenny is another key to the unlocking of Binx loneliness, bringing out the best in him and probably inserting some Christian teachings about the happiness to be found in the heart and not in the mind. The prose of Walker Percy is instantly recognizable in themes and style as Southern Novel, dense and often indirect, allegorical, oblique.

I needed from time to time to get back and re-read a particular passage, but the extra effort was worth the trouble, allowing me to discover and savour a particular turn of phrase, cinematic scenery or emotional twist. The pacing is slow, almost sleepy under the Louisiana sun, yet the restrained passions could become explosive at any moment - witness a memorable rant of aunt Emily about modern American 'nobility'.

Personally, I would have liked more movie references, but the tribulations of Binx held my interest to the final page. I tried to read more on the net about the author and the novel, and I have come across the controversy of the literary prize it received. While I admire Joseph Heller and his Catch 22 , for me the quality of the Moviegoer is not in dispute, and I consider it well worth the time I spent with it, even a good candidate for a re-read.

Having finished the novel, there are few clear conclusions to be drawn, other than the fact that life is worth living probably , and that 'moviegoer' can be translated either as a 'searcher' or as a 'romantic' , someone still believing in the goodness of the people around him. Jul 14, Rayroy rated it liked it. He's the most boring man alive He finds all he needs in a movie theater. Driving cars gives him a feeling of malaise.

The Moviegoer

He carries war scars, he doesn't share. He awakes 'in the grip of everydayness' it's the enemy, with no escape. He doesn't always go to the movies, but when does he goes as a moviegoer. He is the most boring man alive. Nov 08, K. John "Binx" Bolling will soon be turning An ex-Korean war soldier, he is adrift. A lost soul searching for signs where to go, what to do with his life, or even what his existence means. He works in the office as a stockbroker sharing his office with his secretary, Sharon who he is secretly in love with.

Since his brother's death when he was 8, his Aunt Emily took care of him. His mother got married and went to another town when his father died before his brother. His Aunt Emily wanted him to be a successful man but Binx does not know what he wants to do in his life. He is suffering from malaise that Percy defines as: The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo's ghost.

Banquo is the ghost in Shakespeare's play, Macbeth. The plot is simple and Percy's philosophical musings can definitely bore mainstream readers. However, check Percy's life history: Six novels to his name with The Moviegoer as the most popular one. A life well lived yet, while reading the novel, you cannot help but empathize with Binx in his loneliness, his Holden-like angst, sense of loss, his confusion. The doldrum of his daily life: The daily grind in the office working with a series of secretaries whose names happen to be the most popular in the South: Marcia, Linda, Sharon and the possibility of having Stephanie if he continues working there.

He has a cousin, Kate who he loves but he does not know - as he is lost - what to do about it. Their dialogs are a joy to read: My favorite is the closing scene: And oh the movies. Percy has this theory called certification. It means your life does not exist until you see it or a part of it on the celluloid screen.

Once you do, it is certified. Just like being in San Francisco in October where many popular American movies were shot. She is secretly following her mother played by Lorna Tolentino and she is about to find his mother's long-kept secret: Upon finding the secret, Bea, like Binx, experienced a deep sense of loss, confusion and even pain. However, time heals wounds however deep they may be. Bea, like Binx, also spent the rest of the movie confused and bitter. After all, pain is part of our life's journey.

Who knows, like Walker Percy, the Beas and Binxes in us may in the end will be leaving this world with well-lived lives despite all of its twists and turns. View all 18 comments. Mar 01, Wyndy rated it really liked it Shelves: For me, this was the quintessential tale of two halves. For the first pages, I was slogging through these people's lives - bored, not liking or disliking a single character, completely uninvested.

A year-old existentialist, a year-old manic depressive, a year-old frat boy turned lawyer, a well-meaning but interfering matriarch. A magic wand of meaningfulness waved over the final half of the book. This was my first experience with Mr. Per For me, this was the quintessential tale of two halves. Percy, and it sure won't be my last. The truth of course is the exact opposite: When everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nit-wit. But if I could NOT kill myself - ah then. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it.

The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human. Mar 04, Sara rated it really liked it Shelves: Binx Bolling is a man in search of meaning. There is no shortage of persons to tell him who he is, or at least who he ought to be, only a shortage of people who Binx Bolling is a man in search of meaning.

There is no shortage of persons to tell him who he is, or at least who he ought to be, only a shortage of people who actually know who he is or want to see him for himself. But then, there is his cousin not really because his aunt is only her stepmother , Kate, and Kate, like him, is a searcher who cannot find her way.

Scandal at the National Book Awards

I loved the way this story developed, particularly the psychological unveiling of the characters as the plot unfolds. Binx has reasons for his state of confusion, he has survived the trauma of the Korean War and he has failed to pick up his life and sink back into the oblivion of the everyday. Kate, likewise, has endured a traumatic event and been left running from the loss of her planned future and the pointlessness of the life that has been spared to her.

Aunt Emily is their foil: Percy has woven very believable characters into a very realistic world. It is a world of class distinction, pre-determined futures, and family expectations. And, his South seems very real as well. That he understands his subject is obvious. He captures the world of New Orleans and the pressures of a Southern identity. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he stop off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.

Percy won the National Book Award for this, his first, novel, and I can see why.

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