The Moviegoer
John Bickerson Bolling, called Binx, is a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker in the New Orleans suburb of Gentilly who has lately devoted his life to going to the movies and keeping a careful distance from his own feelings. The novel covers the week of Mardi Gras, 1960, in which his Aunt Emily summons him repeatedly to discuss his future, his beautiful and unstable cousin Kate teeters at the edge of another breakdown, and Binx finds himself half-heartedly chasing his secretaries while trying to articulate what he calls the search, the dim suspicion that everyone around him has settled for a life that is not really alive. Walker Percy's debut novel, the surprise winner of the National Book Award in 1962, fuses Kierkegaardian philosophy, Catholic theology, and the languid heat of a Louisiana Lent into a quietly funny, profoundly serious meditation on how an ordinary man might be saved from his own ordinariness.
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Approaching thirty in early 1960s New Orleans, stockbroker Binx Bolling spends most of his evenings at neighborhood movie houses and his Sundays driving the Gulf Coast with a series of secretaries. The novel follows him through Mardi Gras week as his Aunt Emily and his cousin Kate close in.
Yes. The Moviegoer won the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction. Walker Percy was 45 when his debut novel won, and the award helped secure his career as a Southern existentialist novelist.
Sort of. The Moviegoer is about Binx Bolling, a 30-year-old New Orleans stockbroker who escapes existential dread by going to the movies. Films are a metaphor for the search for authenticity, not the central subject.
The Moviegoer was written by Walker Percy, published in 1961 by Knopf.
The Moviegoer is 241 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Moviegoer takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
The Moviegoer is a standalone novel by Walker Percy, not part of a series.
The Moviegoer is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
