It is entirely appropriate that Walker Percy’s southern fried, Louisiana take on the titular character of Camus’ alienated stranger came out the same year as Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

The two novels, The Moviegoer and Revolutionary Road are thematic twins.

The great realization of Yate’s Frank Wheeler is that he’s not special. He and his wife April are always talking about moving to Paris; she will use her linguistic skills to get a job as a secretary-cum-translator at the UN and he will… he will what? Everyone agrees he’s special. That he has something special to offer. But he doesn’t. Not really. And he finally realizes that moving to Paris to become a writer/artist/intellectual is resoundingly stupid because he has no special talent for writing, painting, or thinking. He’s just an ordinary guy.

Jack ‘Binx’ Bolling of The Moviegoer is also an ordinary who everyone insists is special, with some special talent (‘research,’ usually medical research is what people pick as his ideal position – despite being content as an investor and bond salesman). He spends the book fighting that expectation, going to movies whenever he can (and using the theaters themselves, rather than the movies played therein, as milepost markers in his life), dating rather commonplace country girls (the sort we used to refer to as ‘corn fed girls’), and accumulating comfortable sums of money.

There’s the suggestion that a wound he received during an incident in the Korean War may have marred him, dispelling him of thoughts of greatness, but that doesn’t really hold up.

Various incidents, mostly ordinary occur, and he winds up marrying his step-cousin Kate and agreeing to go to medical school and become what everyone thinks he ought to be (because the novel is told first person, the reader is let in on the joke that everyone is wrong about ‘Binx’ – he knows there’s no there there and so does the reader; hence comparison to Camu’s The Stranger, who’s main character is a painfully blank and emotionally affectless slate).

Binx does sometimes talk about this semi-mystical ‘search’ – presumably a search for existential meaning. But he only embarked on that search half-heartedly, at best, and gave it entirely the search for a personal meaning to his existence in order to blankly accept what other people decided his meaning (meaning-ness?) ought to be.

It’s an easy read, mechanically. Not a long book, with a fine, effortless forward motion. But it’s also hard to watch the misguided outside forces shape a somewhat directionless character, who is relatively happy living on autopilot, dating pretty girls with wide hips and full breasts from Alabama, and going to see movies.

And Kate… Kate is severely mentally ill. She’s depressed. Not just sad and melancholy, but deeply depressed in ways that make her a constant danger to herself. It’s never diagnosed, but she is clearly suffers from a depression that most folks can’t really comprehend and she’s drawn so realistically by the author that it’s impossible for the reader to shake the sad understanding that this is the kind of woman who will drown her children in a bathtub. She promises to get treatment, but it’s briefly touched on that those promises have been made before and not kept. And because everyone else knows best (except Binx, who makes no pretense of knowing solutions), she is usually directed to comfortably upper class counselors who won’t give her the medication she desperately needs (or maybe it wasn’t available back then; I can’t say) until she finally winds up locked up for a very long time and kept in a deeply drugged stupor.

It ends… happy? With a man living out other people’s ideas of what he ought to be and married to a ticking, suicidal time bomb. Yes, that happy ending is pretty tricky and I can’t but feel that the author knows he’s given us a false – or rather a subversive – vision of the traditional happy ending (man and woman overcome obstacles, get married, and man finds his true purpose in life – the end).

There’s definitely a college class waiting to happen where The Moviegoer, Revolutionary Road, and The Stranger are read together. If you take that class, make sure to bring a Xanax.