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Audiobook Summary and Review by StoryShots
People with stimulating hobbies suffer the most, because their despair gets tranquilized instead of cured.
A stockbroker who owns a first class television set and a very long lasting deodorant should be the happiest man in New Orleans.
Instead he is drowning.
That is the tension at the heart of The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy, a National Book Award winning novel about a man who realizes his comfortable life has quietly gone numb.
Binx Bolling has everything a young man in 1950s New Orleans is supposed to want.
A steady job managing his uncle's brokerage office.
A wallet full of identity cards and credit cards that certify, as he puts it, his right to exist.
Most people assume this is the finish line.
Binx discovers the opposite.
The better his life looks on paper, the more invisible he feels inside it.
This is not depression in the clinical sense.
It is a quieter fog Binx calls everydayness, and it does not announce itself with a crisis.
It just erases you, one Tuesday at a time.
Everydayness is the enemy.
Notice how often you check a box just to feel real for a second, a receipt, a like, a title, and you are living Binx's exact problem.
Binx has a name for the way out.
He calls it the search, and it starts in a ditch during the Korean War, wounded and suddenly awake to his own existence for the first time in years.
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something, he insists.
Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
That sounds like a full solution.
It is only half of one.
Binx never explains what he is actually searching for, only that avoiding it is its own kind of death.
He wanders New Orleans, then Chicago, certifying his own neighborhood through movies, because the screen makes a place feel real in a way his actual life never does.
Movies do not entertain Binx.
They rescue him from disappearing.
Awareness got him this far.
It does not tell him where to go next.
Here is the line that should stop you cold: Binx admits that considering suicide is the only thing that keeps him alive.
Not because he wants to die, but because the mere possibility of an exit is what makes the trap bearable.
Losing hope is not so bad, he says.
There is something worse, losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
That disguised despair, not despair itself, is the real danger the novel is built around, the kind wearing a smile and a Consumer Reports subscription.
His cousin Kate lives this danger literally, cycling through sedatives while everyone around her performs concern instead of listening.
His Aunt Emily eventually demands an answer he cannot give: what do you love, what do you live by.
That question, and Binx's stunning response to it, decides everything.
If this changed how you think about the gap between a comfortable life and an honest one, someone you know is probably living inside that same gap right now.
Send them this summary.
This summary of The Moviegoer traces one thread from numbness, to the half-formed search for meaning, to the disguised despair that makes ordinary comfort so dangerous.
What we have not covered yet is how Binx's Mardi Gras road trip with Kate actually unfolds, how his Aunt Emily's blunt question finally lands, and what Percy means when he calls settling for ordinary happiness the Little Way.
Readers wrestling with ambition, faith, or the quiet suspicion that their life looks better than it feels will find this one unsettling in the best way.
We are putting together the full summary of The Moviegoer right now, with an infographic and animated video.
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