Reading Order
Walker PercyWalker Percy Novels Reading Order
Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1961), which won the National Book Award in 1962 in a surprise over Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, is a deceptively quiet novel about a young New Orleans stockbroker named Binx Bolling who spends his free time going to movies and searching — without knowing quite what he's searching for — for a way of being alive in the world that doesn't feel like death. Percy, a Louisiana Catholic philosopher-novelist who came to fiction after a tuberculosis diagnosis that gave him years of convalescence for reading, was interested in the condition he called 'everydayness' — the grey, successful, well-adjusted life that is somehow a form of spiritual amnesia. The Moviegoer is his anatomy of that condition: Binx goes to movies because they make the world real again, if only for an hour; he pursues 'the search' without being able to name it; he circles around his depressed cousin Kate in a relationship that becomes the novel's moral center. The novel is short (200 pages), deceptively funny, and one of the most Southern and most Catholic of American novels.
Where to start
The Moviegoer
Complete Walker Percy Book List
- 1Buy
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy·1961·Start here — Binx Bolling in New Orleans, the search, the malaise, the NBA-winning novel that redefined Southern Catholic fiction. - 2Buy
The Last Gentleman
Walker Percy·1966·The follow-up — Will Barrett in Central Park, a different kind of searcher, Percy's most plotted novel. - 3Buy
Love in the Ruins
Walker Percy·1971·Percy at his most satirical — Dr. Tom More in a near-future collapsed America, a comic apocalypse. - 4Buy
The Second Coming
Walker Percy·1980·Will Barrett returns in old age — the most explicitly Christian Percy, a strange and moving late novel. - 5Buy
The Thanatos Syndrome
Walker Percy·1987·Tom More returns — euthanasia, behavior modification, the most thriller-adjacent Percy.
Walker Percy — Frequently Asked Questions
What is "the search" in The Moviegoer?
Binx never fully defines it, and Percy's point is that it can't be fully defined — to name the search exactly is to lose it. It has to do with the sense that ordinary successful life (career, social position, pleasant relationships) can coexist with a profound feeling of unreality, and that this unreality is not cured by more success. The search is for an authentic relationship with existence, which Percy (following Kierkegaard and Heidegger) associates with an openness to the question of God.
Do I need to be Catholic to appreciate The Moviegoer?
No, though the novel's concerns are partly theological. Its portrait of Binx's condition — successful, pleasant, somehow dead — reads as accurately secular as it reads as spiritual. Most readers respond to the novel as an unusually precise description of a malaise that has no obvious explanation, regardless of their religious views. The Catholic framework gives Percy a vocabulary for the condition; the condition itself is recognizable across traditions.
Why did The Moviegoer beat Catch-22 for the NBA?
The 1962 National Book Award decision was controversial and remains so. Catch-22 and Franny and Zooey were both published in 1961 and widely expected to win; The Moviegoer's victory surprised most observers. The conventional explanation is that the jury preferred Percy's formal restraint and Southern specificity to Heller's anarchic comedy. The Moviegoer has since been consistently ranked alongside Catch-22 as one of the major American novels of the early 1960s.
Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.