The Moviegoer

Prior to logging into blogger.com, I sent a brief email to my mother. Just everyday topics: school, money, boys, what have you. I closed with a P.S. which read:

"Have you ever read The Moviegoer? I just did for my American Literature class and I'm not quite sure what to think of it. It didn't stir up any strong emotions in me, just half-formed impressions and opinions. What a foggy novel."

That is truly my response to this piece. There were pieces within it which appealed to me - descriptive passages with a twisted narration, dialogue which expressed much more at second glance. About a third of the way through this book, I grabbed a pencil and started underlining intriguing elements (my God, the abundance of cultural references!). Binx Bollings' investigations and observations were appealing to me ... but he had a sort of attention deficit disorder which jumped from one thing to another and once he had pulled me in with the description of newlyweds he jumped to another character and so on he proceeded, jumping from one lilypad to the next like a frog seeking a fly across the pond. So went his search, search for meaning, search for a higher power, search for a cure to the malaise.

And what to say of Kate? She is both better and worse than our protagonist. She herself admits that it is better to lose hope and admit it rather than lose hope and hide it from oneself, accusing Binx of the latter. She also admits that she is always frightened, and is not sure she will ever be able to overcome her anxiety. She needs Binx to keep the fear at bay.

Binx is an ordinary man when viewed from a distance, but a storm of questions is trapped within him. Kate, however, has sacrificed external calm for self acceptance - she knows she is flawed, maybe permanently. She is strong in her weakness; she is weak in her strength. They both seem to envy each other somehow. Binx aches to pursue his quest by escaping the rigidity of the everyday ... I think part of him wants Kate's freedom. Kate has no grip on the everyday and has made several quests - at the end of each of her "dark times" she came to an answer which seemed life-changing at the time but never resulted in any change ... her situation always remains the same.

They prove that there is no path to the answers. Or rather, the path leads nowhere. The answers do not exist. but perhaps, by accepting a common life, can one survive.

So many things arose in my mind throughout the reading. I don't know quite how to express them looking back; perhaps I will have to go over my underlined phrases...