Danny Nowell recalls the first time he read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, describing its last thirty pages as “one of those really out of body reading experiences”:
At the time, I felt as if Walker Percy were reading my diary to me. I was eighteen and prone to seeing the world as tailored to me personally, but even still the novel was a perfect fit. The muted raciness and frustrated lust of it (it is as much about sex as any novel whose most graphic phrase is the supremely unsexy “flesh poor flesh failed us” can be) feels like a beacon to readers at the age where sex still feels like a secret. I recall feeling as if the book were the most perfect and grandest social commentary I’d ever read. I tested the word “prescient” out on my father after I’d finished it.
Five years later he turned to the book again – only to be confounded:
Family, obligation, love and its overlap with lust now populate the pages where once I read something like a neatly trimmed indictment of late capitalism. In the five years since I last read it—the time elapsed between repetitions—five years’ worth of life has accumulated. Reading my chosen terms of “family” and “obligation” as thematic signposts is as obvious a reflection of my present life as “asses” was for my eighteen-year-old self.
The Dish 