On the master list I maintain of all the books I one day intend to read, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer has always had a place. When I glimpsed it last week in the surprisingly well-stocked kiosk of reading material in Boston's South Station, however, it struck me in a new way. I was looking for a novel to pass the time on a train ride to visit my sister, and something about this one's size, design, and prior reputation seemed to fit the occasion just right. Is it time? I asked the book. Is it your turn?
I turned it over and read on the back cover that the novel's protagonist is twenty-nine years old. Never mind, I thought. This book is for when I'm older. Save this one for later. Then: Wait a minute, with a hideous jolt. I'm twenty-nine! I'd almost forgotten. In my head I'm twenty-five. Or maybe nineteen. When I realized I was exactly Binx's age, it seemed to confirm the novel was speaking to me. It was a sign. I bought it and began consuming it on the ride.
And it was just right. It had come to me at the proper moment and place. It's an excellent book for reading on trains -- not only because the train as a vehicle conjures images of the book's era -- and because a considerable chunk of the book's (minimal) "action" is set on one -- but also because gently swaying to the rhythm of locomotion, while watching the world crawl by silently outside, is highly conducive to the feeling of detached and ironical wistfulness that is the novel's primary tone.
More than this, however, it seemed to come at the right time because it is a book about someone sort of like you and me. Binx is twenty-nine, as mentioned (though the author was considerably older than his protagonist when the book was published); and, just like the reader (at any stage of life), he is full of a sense of vague discontent.
I will never be able to tell you why a novel can be so interesting in which nothing much happens, apart from a mildly depressed twenty-something wanders around moping and observing things, but such in outline is the stuff of every great novel that has ever appealed to the young. It's a more proven formula than car chases and the detective story.
Of course, there are other ways in which Binx is (hopefully) not so much like you and me. Binx spends most of the middle of the novel trying to seduce his secretary, for one, and doing various other things that are similarly not okay.
Percy depicts his era as one in which men virtually assume the women they hire are sexually available to them. In recounting the story of his parents' courtship, for instance, Binx notes that his father requested that a nurse be assigned to him, then waited to see who would arrive, then married her. To the limited extent anyone deplores this in the novel, it is to decry the "lack of imagination" on Binx's father's part, rather than its queasy exploitative nature.
On the anticipated questions of race and the South, meanwhile, the novel occupies a strange and more ambiguous position.
The Moviegoer is a work of Southern literature, of course, but its South is very different from the South of Faulkner (whom the young Percy was reportedly too shy to meet when he had the chance). Here is not the post-Confederate Deep South -- not the Gothic putrefaction, extreme racism, and sexual confusion with which the writer can only have at best a love-hate relationship -- the sort of tortured ambivalence to which Quentin Compson gives voice at the end of Absalom, Absalom! (His Canadian roommate Shreve has just asked him why he hates the South. "I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!" Quentin thinks in reply, in words that end the book -- a sort of less affirmative echo of Molly Bloom.)
Walker Percy's South, rather, is New Orleans in 1961. It is the urban - and urbane - South, just before the Civil Rights revolution. If the characters are still sexual basket-cases like the characters in Faulkner (and they are), they now use psychoanalytic terms to talk about it. Meanwhile, they are not reactionary adherents of the ideology of Southern apartheid. At most they embrace a literary, Fugitives-style traditionalism that implies rather than states its support for segregation (one of them is described, with Percy's usual light satiric touch, as the author of a book "which was commended in the reviews as a nice blend of a moderate attitude toward the race question and a conservative affection for the values of the agrarian South.")
The majority of them, however -- and especially Binx's aunt, one of the most vivid characters in the book -- are adherents of a peculiar kind of liberal humanism that has no regional affiliation. Vague and politically contentless, it is the sort of liberalism that is possible among an aristocracy precisely because it is based on an unspoken assumption that nothing is ever actually going to change.
One of the characters compares the aunt's social set to the members of the nobility in Russian novels, and the point is apt. It is possible for these people to entertain ideas of social emancipation in the abstract, in the same way they take an interest in Theosophy. But more serious departures from social and political norms are closely policed. Binx's cousin Kate, for example, is described as having passed through a radical phase in college. Her aunt regards this "girlish socialism" with affection, as a fitting narrative element in one's "Studententage," (in Percy's wonderful use of German), but she begins to take it rather differently when Kate shows up in actual radical bookstores back home in New Orleans.
To the extent that Binx's and the author's generalized contempt, satire, and despair fasten on an actual target in the novel, it is this: the watery liberal idealism of 1961, encapsulated in the radio broadcast This I Believe, to which Binx hate-listens each week with semi-ironic devotion. It is Kennedy-era liberalism -- far more insubstantial than the transformative liberalism of 1965, infinitely less radical than what would come after 1968, but equally distant as well from the feudalism, racial terrorism, and caste prohibitions of the Old South.
Binx's aunt can't tell why this vague sort of good-natured humanism isn't enough ideological scaffolding to build a life of meaning. She is annoyed with Binx throughout the book for his willingness to drift through life as a mildly prosperous bond-seller and bachelor. She wants him to move into her carriage house, go to medical school, and start serving humanity the way his father did.
In defense of this vision, she offers Binx a sort of healthy-minded existentialism that would have been very much at home in a Unitarian pulpit in 1961. We may not know much about what we're here to do, she says (I'm paraphrasing). We may be stranded on a molten rock in the midst of endless space; but the least we can do is make life a little bit better for the people around us -- to live for their good rather than our own. That sort of thing.
Binx is not interested. He is preoccupied with what he calls "the search" -- a quest to plumb mysteries and grasp the infinite that cannot, by definition, be completed. He tells us that in his past life, he sought to attain the goal of his search through reading scientific literature -- what he calls the "vertical search" -- only to find that it has led him to none of the answers he seeks (paralleling Percy's own disillusionment with his medical career and the path of scientific humanism). He therefore commences his "horizontal search" across geographies, trying to situate himself in particular times and places, so as to remain -- as he puts it -- metaphysically anchored.
The mental factors that prompt Binx's constant seeking and his sense of low-level dissatisfaction could be seen as pathological in nature. Much like Percy's own family, the characters in this book are no strangers to mental illness. Binx, his cousin Kate, and Binx's father are between them a veritable walking DSM of psychic afflictions. Kate appears to suffer from a kind of bipolar disorder that manifests itself as a disposition toward panic and anxiety, coupled with occasional flights of ecstatic "revelations" (followed by bleak depressions). Binx's father's condition -- we are told -- took the form of insomnia, catatonia, and a periodic inability or unwillingness to eat.
Though Percy had been through psychotherapy himself, he and Binx do not really believe the problem is so simple as faulty wiring. The true root of the problem is the flight from "everydayness." Binx tells us at one point that he does not wish to fulfill his aunt's wishes by becoming a doctor for the simple reason that it is better not to live one's life with grand ambitions; later on, however, he reveals that the truth is really -- and paradoxically -- just the opposite. Such a life of mere mortal accomplishment is not enough for Binx. It does not reach the infinite, the endless, the divine something-or-other that is the object of the search. In some of these moods, he tells us, he wouldn't bother to cure cancer if he knew how.
Likewise, Binx's father won't eat, we are told, because eating is not "important enough." It is too mundane, the mere keeping of one's body alive. (Des Esseintes, the protagonist of À rebours, similarly decides, at one stage of his quest to make every aspect of his life as aesthetically perfect as he can, that he no longer wants to consume meals. He starts to contemplate whether it would be possible to survive entirely through nutritional content taken in the form of enemas. I've often thought since that it's a shame he lived in the days before Soylent.)
As for Kate, she is terrified in every situation that is a part of ordinary life, so she begins to consider that her psychology must be a sort of photographic negative of everyone else's. For her, to truly be in the presence of danger and death would be the only relief from constant anxiety. She dreams of becoming an airline stewardess and having to fly across the country multiple times a week. She tells Binx that the best day of her life was when she was nearly killed in a car wreck. She envies him for having had the opportunity to be a soldier in Korea -- because how nice it would be to have an actual "flesh-and-blood enemy" to be worried about for a change. (War also offers Binx's father the eventual path out of his despair.)
So far so good. The first half of Percy's novel, in which these strange and troubled characters are gradually revealed to us, is profound and glowing. Having introduced fascinating people, however, Percy doesn't seem fully sure what to do with them, let alone how to get them out of their psychological predicaments.
To the extent the novel offers solutions or consolation, it is not convincing. This is in marked contrast to the quiet passion with which the characters' depressions and fears and unsatisfiable need for meaning are conveyed to us. When we are told of Binx's "search," when he describes to us his discontent with both the easy and presumptive theism of 98% of Americans and the optimistic humanism of the remaining 2%, the novel carries conviction. But in its closing pages, the book suddenly trails off.
We are informed in these pages that Binx undergoes some sort of religious conversion -- similar to Percy's own -- but the author deliberately refuses to tell us much about it. He passes this off as a kind of coy delicacy, but it reads more as if he can't bring himself to take the story in that direction -- as if he too were embarrassed about departing from the cynical, bleakly funny, existentialist mode of the narrative so far (there is one memorable scene in which Binx struggles to contain a fart while a neighbor waxes to him about how she and her husband have started "reexamining their values"), and as if -- having shown us the impossibility of attaining the infinite -- it is not clear even to Percy how it can be grasped at last in the form of human conceptions and religious practices.
As an embodiment of virtue at the book's end -- and a sign of all that is wrong with the closing chapters of The Moviegoer -- Percy chooses to focus our attention on the fate of the single worst character in the whole novel. This is Binx's half-brother Lonnie, a morbidly pious teenager who delivers periodic spiritual progress reports on his efforts to conquer "habitual dispositions" toward envy. Percy seems to like this character. I challenge you to find me the reader who does.
Oh, and Binx and Kate get married (while Binx takes his aunt up on her idea of going to medical school). What sign have we had from either of them prior to this point that this is remotely a good idea? What reason do we have to think that either one of them could survive a single instant of domesticity?
Truly -- and as with so many of the best novels -- it is the questions it raises, the challenges it poses, that linger. The author's preferred answers have a taste of the ersatz.
Perhaps the real reason why The Moviegoer beckons to the twenty-nine-year-old from the kiosk shelves, then, is not that Binx offers us a way out of our own contemporary dilemma, but simply that he undergoes it in a form we recognize. Binx is in some ways a mid-century Millennial. In brief, Binx is having his quarter-life crisis.
Like a Millennial, Binx has been an adult long enough by this point that he has realized he can do it fairly well. He has reached a level of security and comfort he didn't expect. But his very deliverance from the precariousness and terror of young adulthood is the opening of the next crisis. He now has to contend with the possibility -- voiced by Binx's aunt -- that his apparent contentment is really just a form of settling for mediocrity. Should he have tried harder? If adulthood turns out not to be as scary as he thought, might he not have aimed higher? Could he have been a doctor? Could he have cured cancer? Could he not have reached heaven itself, and touched the divine? Thus, his very happiness is now the source of his discontent.
At the end of the Moviegoer, Binx solves his quarter-life crisis by doing all three of the things most of us fantasize about in our late twenties. He converts to a new (or rather, re-converts to an old) religion; he makes a radical change in his personal life; and he goes back to grad school -- in his case, to become a doctor. (And isn't it so typical, I reflect, that no sooner had I thought I had finally conquered the allure of my own doctor fantasy, than the universe sees fit to taunt me with the story of Binx, and his mid-career switch to the study of medicine.)
This is not how most of us escape the quarter-life crisis, however. We do not live out our fantasies, and usually, if we try to do so, it does not work out quite the way we intend. Rather, from the hubris we feel as we approach thirty, we are called back to our own limits. We are reminded to do the best we can at what is directly in front of us. We are reminded that if we have found we are able to do one band of things rather well in life, it means we should focus on that -- not that we must also be destined to succeed at all others as well.
We are not Buckaroo Banzai, it turns out -- neurosurgeon, martial arts expert, rock musician, and particle physicist all in one. We are Binx. We are mortal. We are searching. And the search can have no end, because to end the search would be to end life. And because the infinite has no end, and cannot be found; because the infinite is -- to borrow Larkin's line -- "nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless."
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