THE MOVIEGOER, THE LAST GENTLEMAN and LOVE IN THE RUINS

by Walker Percy

The Library of America
(www.loa.org)
2024, 975 pages, $45

ISBN 978-1-59853-775-8

Click Here to Purchase

All existential things live and breathe in the MOVIEGOER. It’s a story about stockbroker John Bickerson Bolling, nicknamed “Binx,” who has a weary, sardonic, defeatist view of the characters that he has come to mostly despise.

However, he really loves going to movies, any movies, near his beloved home of New Orleans. Movies are the only relevant items next to some flimsy relationships with his friends and colleagues. Binx dreams of having an affair with his secretary. Yeah, we’ll see how far that goes.

In THE LAST GENTLEMAN, humidification engineer Williston Bibb Barrett returns to the South to seek his fortune and restore his family’s good name. Barrett endures many interesting adventures and escapades.

In LOVE IN THE RUINS, Dr. Thomas More (yes, his ancestor was Sir Thomas More), a psychiatrist by profession and whose wife ran off with an Englishman, is set off on a journey in New Orleans. He’s busy demonstrating a human behavior reader change mechanism called the More Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer, also called the MOQUOL. It is something that could be transformative to psychiatry. In the end, this novel is about love and relationships, and those mystical, quirky and unexplained things called humans.