Recommendations
Books Like The Moviegoer
Best books to read after The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Walker Percy's The Moviegoer is a quietly devastating portrait of Binx Bolling in New Orleans — the search for authentic existence beneath the malaise of successful ordinary life. These recommendations share its existential intelligence, its Southern specificity, or its portrait of a person who can articulate a problem he cannot solve.
- 1
Buy on AmazonThe Last Gentleman
by Walker Percy
The sequel protagonist — Will Barrett in New York and the South, a different kind of searcher, Percy's most plotted and socially wide-ranging novel.
- 2
Buy on AmazonLove in the Ruins
by Walker Percy
Percy at his most satirical — Dr. Tom More in a collapsed near-future America, the existential concerns in a comic apocalyptic frame.
- 3
Buy on AmazonA Good Man Is Hard to Find
by Flannery O'Connor
Southern Catholic fiction's other major voice — grace arriving through violence, the same theological concerns as Percy in a darker and more comic register.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler, repression, a life devoted to service — the British version of Binx's malaise, another novel about someone who cannot name what they've lost.
- 5
Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
The quietest portrait of a good life — William Stoner's academic career, the same dignity and limitation as Binx's search, without the comedy.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault and the absurd — the French existentialist novel Percy was directly responding to, the condition of everydayness in its starkest form.
- 7
Buy on AmazonConfederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
The other great New Orleans novel — Ignatius J. Reilly, the city's color and grotesquerie, a comic register opposite to The Moviegoer's but equally specific to the place.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
A neighborhood remembering the Lisbon sisters — the same quality of beautiful, inexplicable loss, memory that can't fully recover what it's lost.
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