Moviegoing and Other Intimacies

...Women stir him, particularly their beautiful bottoms or "splendid butts," and he spends quite a lot of time chasing them, but he does not appear anxious to catch any...

...In his mind, Jack explains and justifies his behavior in dialogues with movie actors...

...Walker Percy shows performance...

...Jack's Aunt Emily, Kate's stepmother, puts him in the essentially false and crippling role of Kate's keeper...

...with the marvelous phrase, "Not very...

...When, after an elaborate campaign, a girl fends him off, he seems more relieved than not...

...All of these heady ideas result in moviegoing...

...The book's language is sometimes quite fancy, as when Jack's neck manifests "eschatological prickling," or a train corridor has a "gelid hush" and "the peculiar gnosis of trains...

...his aunt asks him...

...At the end of the book, with Jules and Lonnie sacrificiàlly dead, there is some hope that each, with the help of the other, will be better able to function in the world...

...I think that The Moviegoer is a better novel than the work it most readily brings to mind, Albert Camus' The Stranger...

...No," Jack answers, but only because he doesn't think that there is any purpose of life...

...When The Moviegoer received the National Book Award as the "most distinguished" work of fiction published in 1961, there were howls of rage, as though the umpire had made a bum call against the home team...

...The book's narratorprotagonist, Jack Boiling, is a young Louisiana stockbroker of good family, undergoing very considerable emotional difficulties...

...Of the ones I know, some seem unsuitable because too successful to need the award, such as J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, others the work of promising young writers who have not yet demonstrated their staying power, such as Joan Williams' The Morning and the Evening...

...Aunt Emily lecturing Jack with a paperknife in her hand, its tip bent by him as a child—an image of the inclined tree in the bent twig...

...The truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it," he concludes unhappily at another point...

...The heroine of The Moviegoer is Jack's cousin Kate Cutrer, a thin girl with a "marvelously ample" behind...

...Some sentences are elaborately Jamesian...

...He suffers from what he calls "invincible apathy," combined with periodic severe depression...

...In any case, in calling The Moviegoer to the attention of a wider public, the National Book Award has performed a service...

...Only four activities give him any illusion of meaningfulness, and he has reduced his life to them: "I spend my entire time working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women...

...I am not fully able to evaluate the choice, since I have not read all the 11 books nominated...

...He sometimes identifies a person he meets as "a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to the movies...

...Kate's nervous habit of tearing at the flesh around her thumbnail, which might as readily be her heart...

...More than character, language or symbol, the strength of The Moviegoer is its clear strong line of action...

...half-brother Lonnie in his wheelchair, like Jack "a moviegoer...

...One of its features is the concept of "the search," which transforms his aimless and apathetic rambling into a quest for identity and value...

...Seeing a western film in the same seat in the same theater in which one saw a western film 14 years before, in the same season, is "a successful repetition...

...where he longs dreamily for death, she has true suicidal impulses, and makes a try at it once in the book...

...What do you think is the purpose of life—to go to the movies and dally with every girl that comes along...

...At least they have no illusions about how hard the world really is...

...In an experience that Percy has said is autobiographical, Jack spent his college years "propped on the front porch of the fraternity house, bemused and dreaming...

...Where Jack is sunk in apathy, Kate has periods of despair and terror...

...The symbol that dominates the book is New Orleans Carnival Week culminating in the Mardi Gras parade, and its monstrous and mechanical gaiety is the background against which the drama of neurotic quest is performed...

...He breaks out of it by taking her to Chicago and going to bed with her on the train, the two of them just barely managing it under "the cold and fishy eye of the malaise," both terrified, both shaking like leaves...

...For the most part, however, the language is spare and effective, and Percy has a superb ear for speech...

...Much worse," or "You're nuttier than I am...

...The third is a concept of "rotation," defined as "the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new...

...Seeing a western film in the company of the invalid half-brother one loves and a girl one is pursuing, a "fine big sweet piece," is "a good rotation...

...There are flaws in The Moviegoer, certainly...

...Sometimes Jack's philosophy, as when he meditates on "the genie-soul," is just blather...

...It was Percy's first published novel, although he was 45 and had written two earlier novels, unpublished and, he says, "very bad...

...Jack sees all experience, even the death of his brother, in terms of remembered movies, and he acts in the stances of movie heroes...

...Some lesser symbols are subtler yet equally powerful: the elderly married authors of a Technique in Marriage manual, imagined "at their researches, solemn as a pair of brontosauruses, their heavy old freckled limbs twined about one another"—a vision of the enlightened joylessness of our world...

...In my view, the award should recognize a distinguished book by the author of a body of work deserving recognition...

...Percy's use of symbolism shows a sure touch...

...On their return, Jack stands up to his aunt and answers her question, "Were you intimate with Kate...

...We share the same exile...

...Although he has a wallet full of identity cards, he has no sense of identity, and much of the time he has no sense of inhabiting a real place at a real time...

...The fact is, however, I am more Jewish than the Jews I know...

...Percy's talent for the creation of character brings the minor characters just as vividly alive: gentle Uncle Jules, "whose victory in the world is total and unqualified...

...But I have now read Percy's novel, and there is no question but that the judges—Lewis Gannett, Herbert Gold and Jean Stafford—made a responsible and defensible choice...

...I accept my exile...

...She is more desperately neurotic than he, although she repeatedly denies it, insisting "You're like me, but worse...

...The movies are onto the search," Jack says, "but they screw it up...

...They are more at home than I am...

...He is obsessed with death, not the fear of death, but the sense "that everyone is dead," himself particularly...

...There are occasional pretentious attempts to make Jack's search seem not neurotic but deeply spiritual, along the lines of Percy's unfortunate statement on receiving the National Book Award that his novel shows Judaeo-Christian man as "a wayfarer and a pilgrim...

...One character, Sam Yerger, a figure of superhuman wisdom who imitates Amos 'n' Andy, is preposterous from start to finish, and a mistake...

...Jack goes to see them alone, or if he goes with anyone, "it is understood that we do not speak during the movie...

...These are minor failings in a considerable success...

...He hears a Negro servant turn the word "is" into a diphthong "Harlem-style," or Alabama-raised Sharon protest "Ho no, you son," report "I said nayo indeed," and euphemize "God damn" as "Got dog...

...Like George P. Elliott's David Knudsen, Percy's book is a detailed pathology of modern neurosis, but unlike Elliott's it embodies its pathology in a realized fictional form...

...Movies "certify" the reality of places they show...

...I was not the only person who missed it, since Knopf did not push the book very hard, reportedly because the head of the firm was "baffled and somewhat irritated" by it...

...On this neurotic disturbance Jack erects a sizable mystique...

...He is then free to create a valid relationship with her, a marriage in which they pool their neuroses democratically...

...Once Jack drove into a Louisiana village to see a movie in which the characters drive into a Louisiana village to see a movie, a triumphant "repetition within a rotation...

...a deserted ocean wave in a playground, on which Jack often sits, that is recognizably some life rhythm that has been stilled in him...

...Probably the solution is, as Lewis Nichols suggested in the New York Times, to turn the award formally into a first-novel prize, or else to have two awards, as was done once in the past, one for the year's most distinguished work of fiction and one for the best first novel...

...Pleased to learn "that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviegoers are Jews," Jack becomes a metaphoric Jew: "Anyhow it is true that I am Jewish by instinct...

...The Moviegoer is more than pathology because Jack and Kate are not only case histories but complex human beings...

...It is patronizing and ridiculous to say of a 46-year-old man who has been late publishing his excellent first novel that he shows "promise...

...bluestocking Aunt Emily, who expects more of Jack because he and she used to read the Crito together...

...Jack's formidable, beautiful secretary Sharon Kinkaid, a comic masterpiece...

...After an automobile accident in which she was unhurt and her fiancé was killed, Kate had a breakdown...

...On that basis, had I been a judge, I should have voted for William Maxwell's The Chateau or Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Spinoza of Market Street...

...It is visibly the wish for death, and Jack thinks of "the grandest coup of all: to die...

...Another is a concept of "repetition,' a deliberate "re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed...

...Now she is a secret wino and an addict of barbiturates...

...Jack insists that his life is so unreal that he goes to the movies to find reality, but his descriptions of the experience make it clear what special reality he is searching for, what major event requires repetition— it is the uterine state, and the book's title translates as The Womb-Returner...