When The Moviegoer won the prestigious National Book Award in 1962, it beat out future classics like Heller’s Catch-22 and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zoey. Controversy arose because the book’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, had been against publishing The Moviegoer and was put out that it had been nominated without his knowledge. Literary circles were simply baffled. How had an unknown, 42-year-old, first-time novelist managed such a feat?
No one was more perplexed than the author of The Moviegoer, Walker Percy, who after picking up his award confessed that he understood “nothing of the publishing business.”
An uneventful life upended
A native of Alabama, Walker Percy’s early life seems to have been relatively pleasant and uneventful until he was 13. That terrible year, 1929, his father committed suicide. Two years later his mother also died under mysterious circumstances. All his life Percy was convinced that she, too, had killed herself.
Walker Percy and his two brothers were taken in by an uncle, William Alexander Percy, a poet who later wrote an acclaimed autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee. In his Uncle Will’s home Percy was exposed to serious literature and to visiting writers and intellectuals.
Fascinated by science, Percy enrolled in Columbia Medical School in New York with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist – but his life took another abrupt turn when he contracted tuberculosis while interning at Bellevue Hospital.
Discovering the essential question
It was while hanging around a sanitarium library that Percy first encountered the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and existentialist philosophers like Gabriel Marcel.
Up to that point, Percy had been an agnostic and was convinced that science had all the important answers. Questions of meaning could not be answered by the scientific method, of course; but that simply meant that those questions were not worth asking. Stopped in his tracks by illness and haunted by the inexplicable deaths of his parents, Percy began to doubt his rationalism.
If reality was truly just a random series of events that could be explained by equations, if that’s all there was to life, then wouldn’t it make sense to follow the route chosen by his father and (possibly) his mother? To put the question in another light: Why live?
A young man on a “search”
The struggles of those years are reflected in The Moviegoer, a book that was written decades after his recovery from TB. By the time of the book’s publication, Percy had married and converted to his wife’s faith, Catholicism. He has abandoned the worlds of science and psychiatry (though he remained informed about the latest discoveries) and had embarked on a writing career.
A sincere believer in Christ and the sacramental life of the Church, Percy’s faith did not eliminate the urgent existential questions of his youth. In fact, it only made them stronger. Percy’s six novels and works of non-fiction all ask the same basic question: Why live?
In The Moviegoer, this is the question that drives Binx Bolling in what he calls his “search.” A mildly successful if unambitious stockbroker, Bolling spends most of his time womanizing and wandering the streets of New Orleans and its suburbs. As the title indicates, he also spends a lot of time in movie theaters.
Going to the movies is just a form of escape at first. Once Binx starts seriously going about his search, however, his moviegoing becomes more urgent. Like Sherlock Holmes trying to solve a murder, Binx starts looking all around for clues that might help him understand the “why?” that suddenly drives him. He starts to notice that the glamorous characters in movies often feel more “real” to him than the ordinary people we spend our lives with. Why should that be?
Binx sees this as yet another clue that there is something very strange about the human condition.
"Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly ... But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere." - from 'The Moviegoer' by Walker Percy
An essential read for pilgrims of hope
I still vividly remember how enamored I was by The Moviegoer when I first read it years ago. (I was about the same age as Binx.) Here was a way of living that I had not considered before. Was it really possible, as Percy suggests, to live life, even in its most mundane aspects, as a quest for meaning? The novel truly challenged and reoriented my understanding of existence and my Catholic faith.
This is why I propose that Percy’s insights make The Moviegoer an essential read for anyone who wants to live this Jubilee year as a “Pilgrim of Hope.” And it’s also why the book is featured on our list of Big Winter Books for 2025.
Very odd and funny beings
I should also note that The Moviegoer, like all of Percy’s novels, is enlivened by his wonderful and often biting humor. The comedy is never more outrageous or penetrating than when Percy is critiquing American culture – as in this example, where Binx tells us why he often goes to the library to read political magazines:
“Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.”
Nothing has changed today, of course; though we now turn to blogs and social media when we need that jolt of emotions that makes us feel more alive and that eludes us in everyday life. It’s yet another clue that there is something very odd going on inside our hearts.
Like Binx Bolling, we are very strange beings. Yet at any moment my life or yours might well take an abrupt turn and suddenly become a “search.” The adventure might begin anywhere – in a kitchen, a cubicle, a movie theater, a church – if we only begin to take seriously the one question that really matters: Why live?
