The Moviegoer.

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (on the TIME 100 and #60 on the Modern Library 100) was a big yawn. Most disappointing of all is that for a book titled “The Moviegoer,” the protagonist doesn’t really go to many movies at all. I sort of expected a heavy list of allusions to classic films of the 1940s and ’50s, but got next to none.

The book’s real subject, title and dust-jacket description notwithstanding, is depression. Both the main character, Jack “Binx” Bolling, and his cousin-by-marriage Kate are struggling with what would now be called depression, although Kate’s affliction is described by her family as a nervous disorder. Binx is aimless; he’s thirty years old, a World War II veteran with a good white-collar job that holds no interest for him, no immediate family to anchor him, and only a love of the movies as anything that animates him. He mentions a search for something – he’s looking for religion, but talks himself out of looking too hard – and instead he … goes to the movies. But again, the movies are an off-page character in this book.

Percy spends most of the book inside of Binx’s mind, but our windows into Kate’s illness are foggy and often closed, even though she’s the more intriguing character. She was about to get married several years before the time period covered by the book when her fiancé was killed in a car wreck that she survived. She’s about to get married again to a cipher of a man who is obviously not equipped to help her deal with her depression. Yet all we get of Kate are her occasional tangents to Binx, which employ a lot of rationalization to cover the emptiness she’s feeling inside (an emptiness that only becomes apparent in the book’s final 20 pages).

Books about alienation are all over most of the greatest book lists I have mined for reading material, but in general, I haven’t enjoyed them because the alienated characters were dull or annoying or both. Here, we have two alienated characters, but the author focused on the dull one rather than giving us more of the interesting one … who may simply be interesting because we don’t know enough about her to call her dull. At the same time, the book’s treatment of depression is just dated, perhaps a reflection of the time period in which it was written; it’s more a description of ennui than a psychological novel that looks into the abyss.