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Product Description
Product Description
Winner of the 1961 National Book Award
The dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback.
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 thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. 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, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback.
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 thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. 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, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. Read the first page
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When 'The Moviegoer' was first published in 1961 it was a critical success in the USA and won the National Book Award in the following year. Interesting to note that Walker Percy won the award that year ahead of the other finalists which included Joseph Heller (Catch 22); J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey); Bernard Malumad (A New Life)and Richard Yates for Revolutionary Road. How the wheels of time turn!
But this is not a classic that time forgot. The novel also featured in the Time Magazine list of 100 best English Language novels and, judging by the number of reviews for the novel on the Amazon dot com site, it is obvious that it still receives attention from readers on the other side of the Atlantic'
I would suggest that 'The Moviegoer' deserves better attention here in the UK even though it's setting and maybe, just at the outer edges, some of the (mildly expressed) social and racial attitudes may now seem as though they are from another time and another place. No great surprise there. The novel is set amid the fading gentility of 1950's New Orleans and it is a very polite book
Binx Bolling is a veteran of the (forgotten) Korean War. He is an affluent young stockbroker from an upper class Southern family. His thirtieth birthday is approaching and Binx Bolling's great fear is `everydayness' and he finds some sense of heightened meaning in the movies and none-too-energetic lusting after his secretaries. All very politely done, of course, because Binx Bolling is certainly no great womaniser and he is mostly drawn to his manically depressive, self-harming cousin Kate - although even this is uncertain and laden with ennui.
For Binx Bolling most things are uncertain and lack meaning but this is not a tale of premature mid-life crisis, it is a tale of wistful and humorous melancholy. There are points in the novel when everything is something that might have been but if it actually became then it would be insubstantial and insufficient for this is a wryly told story of peculiarly American, peculiarly Southern, existential angst and it is told in the first person with a disarming good humour and barely a trace of malice.
In that sense, maybe Binx Bolling is like an older Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye so do not expect any great sweeping narrative or happenings here. `The Moviegoer' will not grab you by the throat but it will slowly seduce you. It is a novel of conversations illuminated by some jewels of description which conjure up the sense of that time in the fading and neglected elegance of the New Orleans area and some of the thoughts and feelings from the book will stay with you for longer than you expect.
A lovely gentle read that resonates with both intelligence and Southern charm.
But this is not a classic that time forgot. The novel also featured in the Time Magazine list of 100 best English Language novels and, judging by the number of reviews for the novel on the Amazon dot com site, it is obvious that it still receives attention from readers on the other side of the Atlantic'
I would suggest that 'The Moviegoer' deserves better attention here in the UK even though it's setting and maybe, just at the outer edges, some of the (mildly expressed) social and racial attitudes may now seem as though they are from another time and another place. No great surprise there. The novel is set amid the fading gentility of 1950's New Orleans and it is a very polite book
Binx Bolling is a veteran of the (forgotten) Korean War. He is an affluent young stockbroker from an upper class Southern family. His thirtieth birthday is approaching and Binx Bolling's great fear is `everydayness' and he finds some sense of heightened meaning in the movies and none-too-energetic lusting after his secretaries. All very politely done, of course, because Binx Bolling is certainly no great womaniser and he is mostly drawn to his manically depressive, self-harming cousin Kate - although even this is uncertain and laden with ennui.
For Binx Bolling most things are uncertain and lack meaning but this is not a tale of premature mid-life crisis, it is a tale of wistful and humorous melancholy. There are points in the novel when everything is something that might have been but if it actually became then it would be insubstantial and insufficient for this is a wryly told story of peculiarly American, peculiarly Southern, existential angst and it is told in the first person with a disarming good humour and barely a trace of malice.
In that sense, maybe Binx Bolling is like an older Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye so do not expect any great sweeping narrative or happenings here. `The Moviegoer' will not grab you by the throat but it will slowly seduce you. It is a novel of conversations illuminated by some jewels of description which conjure up the sense of that time in the fading and neglected elegance of the New Orleans area and some of the thoughts and feelings from the book will stay with you for longer than you expect.
A lovely gentle read that resonates with both intelligence and Southern charm.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A classic example of Modern Fiction that comes out of the American South. More specifically, we are dealing with Delta fiction--the American Creole. Percy's romantic voice is infected by both his Catholic and medical school experiences. It is clear that these experiences make it difficult for him to remain a romantic. Nonetheless, I believe he triumphs.
He writes of the American rich and the American dream to be rich. He writes of the individual and for it. His other book, Lancelot, is worth a read--Moviegoer is far more superb.
A shame that Moviegoer is becoming forgotten. The book's 30 year old protaganist so easily speaks to the American 30 year old today. Escapist, philosophical, lean. Much better than a trip to the movies.
Format:Paperback
The Moviegoer is a wonderful novel - gentle, yes, but profound also in a characteristically dreamy and oblique way. Many of Percy's characters feel a sort of sense of dislocation, an inability to connect with the world as they find it. When you add in the fact that the South of his day was obviously a very different place even from the rest of America, you get this feeling of being immersed in an entirely different sensibility. Many other novels show young men who have come back from the Army, who can't quite find their place in the world, but Percy does it in an very different way, enchanting and thought-provoking. This is perhaps his most beautifully composed novel, but I also recommend The Second Coming.
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