“An Outlook Recognizably Ours”

What is the first truly "contemporary" American novel, the book that regardless of its age still feels decidedly current in its tone and sensibilities? A swarm of candidates comes to mind (many of them in the LOA series): the psychologically dense, morally ambivalent fiction of Kate Chopin; the urbane and ironic surrealism of Jane Bowles; Ann Petry's prescient dissections of race in America. But one of the strongest claims comes from Walker Percy, the Louisiana-born doctor-turned-author whose 1961 masterpiece, The Moviegoer, was published sixty-four years ago this May.

Paul Elie, who edited the LOA edition of Percy'sThe Moviegoer & Other Novels 1961–1971, writes in a 2019 New Yorker article:

With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frank ruminations on the meaning of life,The Moviegoer is, in my estimation, the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours.

Immersing readers in the mind and muddle of Binx Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who spends his days cavorting with secretaries and taking refuge in the cinema, The Moviegoer is barely a novel in the traditional sense. Loose, discursive, psychological without being psychoanalytical, Percy's prose is pitch-perfect, conjuring a voice you can't get out of your head.

Consider a few of Binx's more memorable observations, as astute and relatable today as they may have seemed taboo and troublingly frank in the early '60s:

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.

Catching the leading wave of a loneliness epidemic washing over the country, Percy's narrator treats alienation and malaise as a doctor might search for telling symptoms in an ailing body:

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

Despite its title, The Moviegoer is less about watching movies than the ways in which movies and movie logic have come to feel, in an atomized age, more real than life itself (Binx himself refers to the process of "certification," where the appearance of a place or person in a film confers specificity upon it, a sense of actually existing in the world).

Emerging from a less media-saturated era than our own IP-soaked present, Percy's novel deftly captures the feeling of being adrift in a sea of images, dreams, and abstractions—our own and others'—in which profound musings about the nature of life and faith stand on equal footing with the mundane and workaday. The effect, strangely enough, is liberating: "I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself," reports Binx. "One is free."