A review by jenna_le
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

3.0

For most of the time I was reading this, I wasn't sure I liked it. The conjuring of a sense of place and atmosphere was quite fine. The sleek prose was nice, although the author seemed at times far too proud of himself for having gone to medical school and tosses around medical jargon rather unnecessarily and show-offishly (Walker Percy and I are alumni of the same med school, which is one of the things that drew me to pick up this book in the first place). Some of the characters are very well drawn (e.g., Aunt Emily, who is given an absolutely wonderful speech at the end), others less so (e.g., Sharon, who is only shown to us through the lens of the protagonist's emotionally detached and patronizing lust and therefore never becomes more than a highly polished surface despite occupying a lot of space in the novel). The protagonist's emotional immaturity irritated me (the protagonist is a 29-year-old man but seemed to me to act younger), as did the dated sexual and racial politics of the book as a whole (the book was published in 1961, and while it's modern in some ways -- the frankness and authenticity with which it treats bodily functions and mental health, for example -- it's far from modern in others). Still, the book started to grow on me in the penultimate quarter, where we see the main character visit his half-siblings and we finally start to see him show a bit of heart, especially in his bond with his younger half-brother Lonnie. Then the final quarter of the book happened, and I was surprised to find that that was very very very good -- I found myself underlining passage after passage, page after page, something I had not done for the first 80% of the book. Really, it's hardly an exaggeration to say that the entire heart of the book -- the entire plot, the entire emotional core of it -- is contained in that last 20%. The journey to get there was frustrating, but it paid off in the end.