The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

American culture and alienation are not a natural match, which I think explains what makes this such a strange read. There’s something strange as well as understated about it all the way through.
 
We get to know Binx Bollinger as a law-abiding professional in New Orleans, around 1960, whose casual approach to this, that and everything is gradually shown to indicate a hollowness that most probably has to do with this war experiences in Korea, although the malaise feels constitutional to his being. He suggests a commitment to a personal “search” of some nature, but search me if there is one. He remains directionless, uncomplaining, drifting across the surface layer of life.
 
The plot is quite uneventful and it’s our gradual perception of the narrator’s inability to want anything badly enough, his absence of emotional conviction in any normal sense, that make the impression. He’s no rebel. If he goes along with American social norms, it is simply that he lacks any belief system that might question them. The strongest character is his cousin, Kate, whom trauma really has broken. Binx’s active concern for her, a kindred spirit, seems a deflection from his own existential predicament. We see him playing a part for others, but never get to know who he really is. Maybe there’s just this sad estrangement and that’s the point.
 
I did and I didn’t like it. It left me with the sensation of an oddly unwelcome dream that you can’t make sense of on waking and are glad to put behind you.