The Moviegoer

Not much happens in Walker Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, but the narrative has a constant, low-level intensity as it traces the melancholic despair of its protagonist (an aimless and alienated New Orleans stockbroker). “I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”