This one came highly recommended by a friend of mine who is a lit grad student. Definitely a "man" book. Percy spends a lot of time waxing poetic about women and their various body parts--but the story isn't about that, fundamentally. More of a coming of age (late though it is), I think. ( )

at first i was really liking this, the way that we see binx being lost in his life but finding his way through cinema but then it turned into something else and i myself was the one lost. i disliked the depiction of just about everyone (women, people of color) that he encountered and don't know if this is just another of the older books written by white men that i don't find any connection with, or if there was really just nothing to connect to. this won the national book award in 1960 (and was percy's first book), and i'm disappointed not to like it more.

this description is so spot on though: "...I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head." ( )

Very moody, meandering novel about a man lost inside his own head. Not much plot but superb writing. Conveys the sense of New Orleans beautifully. I thought the ending was facile, but this book is worth reading. ( )

This is a singular book. Written in a laconic style that has the pacing of noir and the worldview of a Camus character but yet, infused with an easygoing sense of the speed of life in the suburbs of Louisiana . I liked all the descriptions of character and place. People aren't happy and that's a lot of what this is. People who are looking for a plot-driven story, please choose a different novel. Some have referred to this book as the first modern novel. ( )

Like a heaping plate of comfort food for me. Also contains one of my favorite quotes in a novel: “Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals.” Hell yeah. But wait, there’s more.

Binx Bolling doesn’t seem to be having a bad time of it, a young man successfully managing an office of the family brokerage firm in 1959/1960 New Orleans, having a series of dalliances with his secretaries, and going to a lot of movies. Only unlike most of us, he has the knowledge that such things are merely an effort to keep the existential despair at bay at the forefront of his mind. He instinctually feels the quote from Kierkegaard that is the novel’s epigraph: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair”. Now he knows he is in despair and thus he is a bit better off by Kierkegaard’s reckoning, a step closer to the solution to it, but he is still a long way off a grounding of himself in religious faith. The forms and husk of religion are all around him of course, being plenty thick in the “Christ-haunted” but not “Christ-centered” South, as Flannery O’Connor memorably phrased it, but Kierkegaard too would have recognized the deadness of them. The best Binx can do is an awareness of “wonder” and a rejection of that which he feels too grossly ignores or obscures the wonder.

His state of despair and inadequate search for resolution to it are best recognized for what they are by his step-cousin Kate, who is often in the grip of a strong depression, who seems possibly bipolar. Like recognizes like, in a manner. She tells him, “You remind me of a prisoner in the death house who takes a wry pleasure in doing things like registering to vote. Come to think of it, all your gaiety and good spirits have the same death house quality. No thanks. I’ve had enough of your death house pranks”. She tells him, “It is possible, you know, that you are overlooking something, the most obvious thing of all. And you would not know it if you fell over it.” Not that she knows what it is either, rather she’s given up the possible search: “Don’t you worry. I’m not going to swallow all the pills at once. Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.”

Binx, like Kate and Kierkegaard, understands the commonplace human tendency to hide our despair from ourselves, what he calls “sinking into everydayness”, even if the three of them (in the novel’s current moment at least) exist in pretty different places after similarly escaping it. Kierkegaard thinks he knows the answer. Kate thinks there is no answer. Binx, as befits a more modern day literary fiction hero, embraces uncertainty. Watching an apparently materially successful African-American man exiting church on Ash Wednesday, the ending day of the novel, ashes marked on forehead, he thinks

I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.

( )