[Book] The Moviegoer

/spoilers/ I can't believe I read most of this book in one sitting, and it's not because it was so good I couldn't put it down. Rather, I couldn't wait to get it over and done with. The Moviegoer is another 25-cents used book I picked up at the library book sale last year. I didn't realize it when I got it but apparently it was considered one of the great American novels by some book list or the other. Well, it didn't impress me that much. First of all, it is a book about existentialism, which in itself is depressing enough. Secondly, the setting is in New Orleans and the American south, which is not that interesting to me. Then the plot. I think this blurb from the back cover of the book says it all:

For years I have had no friends. I spend my entire time working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women ...

So begins the story of Binx Bolling, hero of the MOVIEGOER ...

Ultimate, Binx breaks out of his own shell by having to face the far more desperate problmes of his beautiful cousin, Kate Cutrer ... In the end, when Kate hits bottom, only Binx can save her ...

Cheesy enough? It doesn't tell the whole story though. Rather than a romance, the book is mostly about this guy's "search" for life's meaning. The main character's emotional detachment from reality is true to the existentialist literature where the man character is always the stranger in his environment and in his own life. This characteristic of Bonx Bolling really makes him an irritating character to me, however. He whines and "searches' but never tries to change anything. Equally annoying is the writer's style of writing. He writes stuff like this:

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a perons lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. 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.

It sounds deep but it doesn't really mean that much. The main character describes everyone else as being "dead" from "everydayness" but he is the person who has no anchor in life. He has no depth and that's why he's looking for something other than what he has. In the end, he accepts his ordinariness, and I guess that's the whole point of the book. However, I can't get over how whining and unlikable the main character is, and the other characters aren't that interesting either. Kate, the "beautiful cousin" is a weakly developed character, who doesn't really transform by the end the book. The only difference is that she finds someone, that is, Binx, to take care of her by marrying him. How nice. There are other themes of religion, duty and such, but I didn't really care to read into them too carefully because the story was just so goddamn boring. The writing is not to my taste, and I can't really relate to what the author is trying to say in this book, and honestly, I think others have said it better than Walker Percy, whose existential angst appears rather superficial and juvenile.

5/10