fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

‘The Moviegoer’ And The Novel Reader

Andrew Santella writes about his strange and kind of obsessive relationship over the years with Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. Excerpt: Writing in the New York Review of Books in 2005, Joyce Carol Oates identified Binx as one of a string of solitary, cool, self-absorbed males in American fiction—other examples including Saul Bellow’s Joseph from Dangling Man, and […]

Walker-Percy_eblastbanner

Andrew Santella writes about his strange and kind of obsessive relationship over the years with Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. Excerpt:

Writing in the New York Review of Books in 2005, Joyce Carol Oates identified Binx as one of a string of solitary, cool, self-absorbed males in American fiction—other examples including Saul Bellow’s Joseph from Dangling Man, and the narrator of Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision. I took Oates’s critique as personally as if she had been questioning my own character. These were my role models she was writing so scathingly about. If they were cold, self-dramatizing narcissists, what was I?

The short answer is that for many of the years I spent re-reading The Moviegoer, I was just as confused as Binx. I certainly aspired to be every bit as cool and every bit as noncommittal. It didn’t work. It turned out to be a lousy strategy for, as the life coaches say, professional and interpersonal success. I took a Binxian approach to women, which is to say I told them lie after lie even as I assiduously pursued them. I turned my lunch hour at work into two or three hours of drinking, and I thought Binx would have been proud.

I don’t mean to suggest that The Moviegoer messed me up or corrupted me. But maybe it validated my impulse toward the passive and disconnected. It gave me permission to be the f*ck-up I always thought I could be. My girlfriends, unimpressed with the literary influences behind my evasions and lies, dumped me. My bosses, with no use for an employee who disappeared for hours on end, fired me.

He writes that he had begun to identify so completely with the protagonist, Binx Bolling, that he failed to see that Binx is not a hero, not at all. Read the whole thing, and learn what broke the novel’s spell for Santella. More:

But I’ve crawled so deep into The Moviegoer over the years that it’s hard to tell where I start and where the novel begins. Have I kept reading The Moviegoer because it spoke to something in me that existed before I first read it? Or am I who I am right now because I’ve been reading The Moviegoer all these years?

If you spend enough time with a book over enough years, you may start to think it belongs to you somehow. But what if it’s really the other way around?

If we could convince Andrew Santella to come to the Walker Percy Weekend, I would find some way to give him a forum to talk about his relationship with The Moviegoer, a la Spalding Gray. How about it, Andrew? You have at least got to get down here and record all this with the LSU Walker Percy oral history project we’re launching at the festival. And hey, readers, this is your reminder to order your tickets now (follow the link in this graf), and make your lodging reservations. Rooms are filling up.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now