Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Percy’s first novel, published in 1961, is a startlingly rich and unsettling portrait of anomie under the aspect of modernity, seen through the eyes of a young man from New Orleans who flees from his fear of the meaninglessness of life by going to the movies and chasing his secretaries. Alienation is to American literature what love is to Italian opera, but The Moviegoer makes something enduringly new and relevant out of the old, old story (TT).
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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