"It's not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh."
Hoo boy, we've got an overwritten, plotless bore on our hands here. The big shame here is that Percy is a hell of a writer. But every sentence is a too painstaking. I wanted him to be a bit more careless as a writer. I think he has it in him; his narrator (the book is written in first-person, present tense), Binx Bolling, displays flashes of very funny, very dry wit throughout.
We follow Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker, womanizer, and moviegoer, during the week leading up to his 30th birthday (and Mardi Gras). He lives his life according to "the search," a constant hunt for anything to avoid what he constantly calls "malaise." A lot of his search involves dalliances with his revolving-door secretaries, but while he's a fancy writer, Percy is also a sexless one, so most of his "search" regarding his own relationship with sex falls flat, despite its potential. God also comes into the picture about two-thirds into the book; I'm all for a late-game Hail Mary, but the introduction is sudden and jarring. Apparently six years after The Moviegoer was published, Percy converted to Catholicism, and Bolling's agnostic tone is unconvincing.
But the book's main flaw is that nothing happens. It's a bit of a chore to read, especially the first 100 pages. So much of the book occurs in Bolling's mind, and while some of my favorite books do the same (The Stranger and Heart of Darkness come to mind), Percy is unable to plunge as deeply as Camus and Conrad, so the reader is left wanting.
RECOMMENDATION? Skip it. Percy is obviously a writer of talent, but it suffocates his book. There is a 20 page stretch where Bolling and his cousin are on a train to Chicago, and the book gets really good. But that doesn't happen until page 184...
-N.C.
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