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In The Moviegoer, Percy lays out the foundation of two so-called “cures” for isolation and boredom. The first is the devotion to duty and traditional Southern values, as exemplified by Aunt Emily.  The second is the mystery and absurdity of Catholicism, and Ash Wednesday as taught and practiced by Binx’s unconventionally catholic mother.

John Binkerson (“Binx”) Bolling is a self-described fine, contributing citizen of a New Orleans family who for some years has devoted himself to money, sex, and watching movies. The movies in which Binx immerses himself is our first clue to the superficiality and lack of “substance” in his own life. The novel begins during Mardi Gras when Binx begins to feel a need for something more substantial in his life. We meet his Aunt Emily, a fine Southern woman of the community, and Kate, his cousin whom others view as unstable since her fiancé’s death some years earlier.

All of this takes place on the bayous, where Binx visits his  mother and her new family. (Binx’s father died in World War II; Binx, served in the Korean War.)   After this visit, Binx goes to Chicago with Kate where, unlike in the movies, he is forced to answer questions, make decisions and live with the effects those decisions have on the lives of others.

Quotes from The Moviegoer:

“I go to bed cozy and dry in the storm snug as a larva in a cocoon, wrapped safe and warm in living Christian kindness.  From chair to bed and from TV to radio for one little nightcap of a program.  Being a creature of habit, as regular as a monk, and taking pleasure in the gram called This I believe.  Monks have their compline, I have This I Believe.  On the program hundreds of the highest-minded people, people in the country, thoughtful and intelligent people, people with mature inquiring minds, state their personal credos.  The two or three hundred I have heard so far were without exception admirable people.  I doubt if any other country or any other time in history has produced such thoughtful and high-minded people, especially the women.  And especially the South.  I do believe the South has produced more high-minded women, women of universal sentiments, than any other section of the country except possibly New England in the last century.  Of my six living aunts, five are women of the loftiest theosophical panBrahman sentiments.  The sixth is still a Presbyterian.”

NOTE: One of Percy’s most cited statements about the ambiguity of the old Southern codes comes in Love in the Ruins when Dr. Thomas More witnesses a black man, and a white racist putting aside ideology to help him:

“the terror comes from the goodness and what lies beneath, some fault in the soul’s terrain so deep that all is well on top, evil grins like good, but something shears and tears deep down and the very ground stirs beneath one’s feet. . . . The terror comes from piteousness, from good gone wrong and not knowing it, from Southern sweetness and cruelty, God why do I stay here? In Louisiana people still stop and help strangers. Better to live in New York where life is simple, every man’s your enemy, and you walk with your eyes straight ahead.”

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The Moviegoer

Read our bio of Walker Percy and peruse his other books!