The search for meaning is a staple of literature. For that matter, it's a staple of civilization. Once you don’t have to worry about survival from day to day, that's what comes next.
The problem with spiritual quests for meaning is that they end up being recitations of clichés. Spiritual meaning is not found in money or sex. We know this because writers and dramatists have told us more times than we can count. It can be found in love or family, we know this for the same reason and we also know this because our sentimentality tells us so and we happily surrender to it because questing for meaning is really no fun at all.
Binx Bolling is a Korean War veteran coming up on his 30th birthday. He comes from an old money, rather eccentric New Orleans family. He is something of a black sheep and seemingly rather directionless. He passed up on a family approved career in medical research — a field in which he showed talent — and now works as a stock broker in the family brokerage.
Binx has abandoned New Orleans proper for the suburbs, spends his time making money for his clients (and himself), bedding his secretaries, and going to the movies. This is the prototypical lost bachelor life; superficially comfortable and satisfying to the point where a man must wonder "Is that all there is?"
You see what I mean about clichés?
Except Binx doesn't delude himself with conventional wisdom. He doesn't believe the answer is love or adventure in the traditional sense. He engages in something he refers to as The Search, a Zen like process in which he is not so much attempting to find answers as to see the world as it truly is and appreciate what is before his eyes. Much of this stems from his experience of being wounded during the war and, while lying in great pain from his wounds, uncertain of whether he would live or die, he observed a beetle moving about and saw it with an existential clarity. His mission is to view the world as such; to not give in to the despair of the mundane.
It sounds horribly pretentious, but Percy doesn't play it that way. As we follow Binx through a couple of weeks of life, we are not exposed to any extended treatises on the deep spiritual nature of things from a monk-like point of view. Binx is a bit of an eccentric, from an eccentric family. He likes making money for his clients and himself. He visits with two disparate sects of his family and keeps up close ties with both. He chases after his secretaries and has a healthy, and rather ribald, appreciation of the female backside.
Article comments
1 - Bryce Eddings
listed at Advance
2 - Teresa
I did not enjoy this book at all, not because it was too deep or whatever, but because I found the writing to be down right boring. I like the story of the novel, and especially how it sounds in this review. But it is so hard to get through! I had to put it down because I would get tired and bored and disinterested in what I was reading.
3 - james
wow... i hate to say it man, but damn you can't write. or maybe you can, but please stop reviewing books. from the book's premise it sounds somewhat interesting, but you really should have an editor look over your stuff before you post it. i mean i guess that's one of the inherrent "features" of the blog format--not having an editor--but with stuff like book reviews you're writing for a literary audience dammit! you should at least make your review not suck. i want my 3 minutes back.
4 - Bill
What you left out is that the key to understanding Percy novels is not Zen or anything like that. It's existentialism, specifically Kierkegard. Percy is the American Camus. If you understand one, you can understand the other. And if you can understand Kierkegard, you can understand Camus, Percy, Sartre, and every other existentialist. Do some simple Internet research before you write up a review, please.
5 - luis
I would just like to say that this review is dead on.
6 - sally
You have got to be kidding me. How stupid, how uninsightful, how plainly illiterate have we Americans become? If you can't comprehend a flawless existential novel, if you can't at the very least delight in prose so exquisite in its rendering of man and environment, please stop reading altogether lest you feel compelled to fling another ridiculously uninformed opinion at the universe. I have long argued that if we only read more, we'd be smarter as a population. Shit like this makes me hang my head in shame.