The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Winner of the 1962 National Book Award The Moviegoer was Walker Percy’s first published novel. It’s the story of a man just shy of his thirtieth birthday wondering what the meaning of his life is. The time is after the Korean War in which Jack “Binx” Bolling was wounded. He is now a stockbroker in a family business but struggles with insomnia and dreams. His ordinary life seems unreal to him and he finds himself more drawn to the fiction of movies. He imagines himself reacting to real life situations in ways the actors and characters in the movies would. His aunt still clings to the Old South while other family members and friends try to deal with an America turned upside down by World War II and Korea. Some have succeeded while others are torn between the two societies. It’s as if they are all suffering from PTSD, before it had that name. But in many ways, don’t we all feel some kind of alienation in our lives in a post-modern age that leaves us without a soul? Jack’s “big search” is amorphous. Is he looking for God? Is he looking for a past that never was? A future that will provide him with something other than emptiness? He finally settles on going to medical school and marrying his fiancé Kate, as well as reconnecting with his family. But will this be what he was looking for or will it continue to be a life, as Thoreau puts it, of “quiet desperation?”

Walker Percy (28 May 1916 – 10 May 1990) and his wife converted to Catholicism in 1947. His first essay as a Catholic writer was published in 1956 in Commonweal. “Stoicism in the South” condemned segregation, racism being anti-Christian. His religious beliefs would inform his writing throughout his life. Characters in his six novels were inspired by his family members and his own experiences as a doctor living in the South. Born in Alabama, Percy lived for over forty years in Covington Louisiana near St Joseph’s Benedictine Abbey. Late in his life he became a secular oblate of the monastic community and is buried at the abbey.

Although many of his family members and ancestors committed suicide, Percy did not consider this in his final battle with cancer. His Catholic faith prepared him for suffering and death according to God’s will. In fact, he enrolled in the Mayo Clinic’s experimental cancer drug program and made frequent trips to the clinic in Rochester Minnesota. In a letter to his best friend historian Shelby Foote he described the frustration of the travel and debilitating nature of the drugs on his body: “Hospitals are no place for anyone, let alone a sick man.” However, instead of giving up, his biographer Patrick Samway says he “had a revelation when he saw children with cancer waiting in the lounges. He knew then and there that he would continue the treatment at Mayo as long as he could, so that the results of his treatment might someday be of value to others.” Here is a man, not a saint, living a life and death of nobility, submitting to God’s will and giving of himself for others, showing how we act as children of God, the body of Christ.