THE MOVIEGOER by WALKER PERCY (1960)

After completing only a few pages of The Moviegoer, I strongly suspected that I would not enjoy reading the book. The tone is flippant and cynical, the self-absorbed musings of a man in search for authenticity, or something else indefinable even to himself, to give purpose to his life. I was reminded very much of Catcher in the Rye, except that this book's protagonist is a 30-year-old man instead of a boy. I have little patience with this type of intellectual masturbation, but it is at least understandable supposedly coming from a teenager. However, I kept on reading and at the very end of the book I was rewarded with a glimmer of hope for the character's redemption from a life of existential angst.

Binx Bolling is a member of a wealthy Old South family in New Orleans, is well-to-do in his own right from his career as a stock broker, and is attractive to women, going through a procession of girl friends. He seems to have it all, yet he is adrift and afflicted with malaise. He says, "What is malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo's ghost." He finds that he feels most authentic when watching characters in a movie. When Binx is summoned by his aunt to help her in dealing with his mentally unstable cousin Kate, the question becomes, can two people who are apathetic and not anchored to reality help each other?

This is a very well written and subtle novel, but I hated it until the last ten pages. It won the National Book Award in 1962 and is included in the Time and Modern Library lists of the 100 best novels of the 20h century.