The Voice Imitator: 104 opportunities to encounter Thomas Bernhard in one page or less

I have recently endeavoured to compel fellow readers to explore the works of the late Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Thomas Bernhard, whose novels I have only recently begun to explore and whose plays and poems I hope to explore imminently, yet I have been reminded over the course of this endeavour that it may prove difficult to compel fellow readers to explore the works of Thomas Bernhard due to their (in)famous prose style, distinguished by very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves while they are in fact building a seductive and compelling rhythm and tension and secretly working to reward the reader with the utmost narrative clarity and an arresting sense of voice. My endeavour has been aided by the recent reprinting of many Bernhard’s novels, such as The Loser, about suicide, genius, and Glenn Gould, and Correction, about suicide, genius, and a cone-shaped edifice, by the recently published Prose, and by the even more recently published My Prizes: An Accounting, though none of these has filled me with as much hope of compelling fellow readers to explore the works of Thomas Bernhard, despite their very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves, as The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press, $12 US), whose darkly comical, anecdote-like stories, about suicide, murder, accidents, governments, and generally peculiar behaviour, are so short as to never exceed a page’s length and thus diminish the potentially off-putting effect of those very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves. There is additionally something ironic about a work from Thomas Bernhard being called The Voice Imitator since I can think of few other late 20th century writers whose writerly voice has been more closely imitated or, as it were, paid homage, by writers whose work I’d already come to adore, such as W.G. Sebald, Geoff Dyer, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, who have done such inspired work of imitating or, as it were, paying homage to Thomas Bernhard’s writerly voice that I will with this sentence cease my own pale imitation or, as it were, homage, to the writerly voice of Thomas Bernhard.

Bernhard’s micro-fictions are often founded in personal experiences, often shared with a small group of anonymous friends. He seems attracted to precisely those strangers who go out of their way not to attract attention—twice in The Voice Imitator a story begins when Bernhard and his companions become fascinated by a solitary figure in a tavern made conspicuous by his “taciturnity.” Just as often, Bernhard’s stories seem culled from truncated news reports or hearsay: the lavish mountainside hotel abandoned by its grieving owner and left to the elements having never once been occupied; the fortune teller murdered for failing to provide a philanderer with an accurate prophecy of his wife’s death; the postman consigned to an insane asylum who asks that he be able to continue wearing his postman’s uniform so as to not go insane; the discovery of a giant skeleton in a village always thought to be inhabited solely by very short people; the fireman who pulled away a safety blanket just as a suicidal jumper jumped because he was overtaken by “an inner compulsion.”

Bernhard seems drawn to these stories for their grave ironies and subtle insights, though so often it’s difficult to discern what’s based on fact and what is pure invention. Not that it matters. The Voice Imitator is filled with deliciously unqualified generalizations and assumptions. In ‘Genius’ Bernhard writes that in Vienna, “lack of consideration and impudence towards thinkers and artists has always been greater than anywhere else.” If Bernhard’s legendary loathing of his home country renders such a claim highly suspicious it in no way diminishes its power to evoke a singular psychological landscape. Characteristically, these stories keep circling themes of suicide and despair, but they also return again and again to tales of unlikely connections between people. With any luck, The Voice Imitator might even forge new connections between Bernhard and those readers willing to give this extraordinary author a chance.

Out of Sheer Rage: the road not taken

Geoff Dyer, not writing about D.H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer negotiated with the inexplicable allure of great music by invoking moments in the lives of several giants of jazz through fiction-like prose in But Beautiful, one of my favourite books about music ever. Now back in print, Dyer’s 1997 book Out of Sheer Rage (Picador, $15 USD) takes a very different approach to writing about D.H. Lawrence, the writer who made Dyer want to be a writer. Dyer’s approach to Lawrence however is largely about avoiding any approach whatsoever. Out of Sheer Rage is a memoir of perpetual procrastination, addiction to anticipation, and despair. Steve Martin says it’s the funniest book he’s ever read. I’m rather fond of it myself.

D.H. Lawrence

Dyer’s considerable feat is to sustain our interest in something he’s promised from the beginning is going nowhere by actually going all over the place: to Italy, Greece, Mexico, to the US, and back home to England, to survive an island moped crash, illness, dubbed movies, the temptation to masturbate in public, and, echoing a choice passage from Don DeLillo's White Noise, the inevitable disappointment of standing in a place intended to radiate significance, or more precisely, to stand in the place where some dead admired person once stood, trying to conjure nonexistent emotions. This is something Dyer does especially well, dissecting conflicted responses to ostensible grandeur, always with a wit every bit the equal of Dyer’s titular rage.

There is of course plenty of literary commentary in Out of Sheer Rage, its belated arrival feeling almost subversive. Dyer considers his youthful reading and in some cases refusal to reread much of Lawrence—save the entire collected correspondence—as well as the work of Thomas Bernhard and Milan Kundera. He makes a compelling case for the writing of a book being only slightly ahead of the research for a book, for a writer’s notes for a novel sometimes being more valuable than the novels themselves. In one passage of just a few pages, Dyer eloquently sums up much of what David Shields spent all of Reality Hunger, his fascinating and frustrating manifesto-by-collage, trying to say—partially through pulling quotes from Out of Sheer Rage. This might explain Dyer’s own wry appraisal of Reality Hunger: “Reading it, I kept thinking, ‘Yes, exactly, I wish I’d said that,’ and then I realized I had.” Shields only included citations in his book because his publishers forced him to, so all readers who hungered for more of the reality Shields used as his source material owe the old farts at Knopf a great favour, because they at least had the courtesy to include the information that might lead us to read Out of Sheer Rage.

Sounds of silence: new biographies of Eno, Gould

Eno, seated before at least two instruments

There are artists whose contributions to art enthrall us even while seemingly urging art itself toward some sort of end. Brian Eno and the late Glenn Gould offer potent case studies, the former a self-described “non-musician” traversing the margins of pop and the avant-garde, the latter one of history’s great virtuosos, working largely within the Western classical canon. Both either avoided or completely swore off live appearances early in their careers in favour of the recording studio, where their innovations focused on music’s vertical or textural qualities over the documentation of performance or celebration of technique. Both sought to diminish the centrality of the artist in the making of art, the former remaining an advocate of self-generating systems, the latter having made bold pronouncements to the effect of art’s eventual irrelevance altogether. There is something apocalyptic to such a sensibility.

Gould, with large pants

Of course, both Eno and Gould have at one time or another been pegged as consummate bullshitters. In his absorbing and ambitious new biography, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (Orion, $34.95), British writer and musician David Sheppard describes how being interviewed early in his life taught Eno “to construct a theoretical context for his work after the event. He would subsequently develop a nonpareil facility for articulating persuasively plausible retrospective concepts for what had simply been intuitive, or happenstance creativity.” In Glenn Gould (Penguin, $26), his provocative biographical essay, Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell writes of Gould’s “after-the-fact rationalizations” and the “danger that his theorizing will undermine the joy given by his performances.” What emerges in both books are portraits of artists whose capacity to apply systems or polemic to their art, however compelling, must be considered secondary to the art itself, which can feel so multifaceted as to overwhelm those who endeavour to encapsulate it.

Eno chased a lot of girls in his youth,

only partly to borrow their outfits

Eno was born the same year as the LP, the hologram, and Velcro. As a child in mid-1950s Suffolk he collected fossils, saw a UFO, and was fascinated by the alien-like sounds of doo-wop emanating from nearby USAF airbases. Sheppard, who first met the composer/producer/video-artist/et al. at Michael Brook’s studio when Eno popped by to examine Brook’s fish cutlery, gives a vivid sense of his subject’s rather idyllic rural English upbringing and panoply of early fascinations. It’s a lot of fun to read Sheppard’s evocations of Eno’s formative art school experiences, his attraction to John Cage, androgynous clothing, audio equipment, the Velvet Underground, Mondrian, Little Richard, and girls. A wildly productive, vivacious dilettante, Eno’s appetite for diverse forms and subversive approaches were matched by a particular bravado regarding his ability to interact with whatever medium, regardless of ostensible facility. There is, Sheppard writes, “something of a late medieval polymath about Brian Eno, albeit cut with a very mid-20th-century strain of British ‘garden shed’ amateurism.”

Eno, Fripp, Bowie in Berlin

While methodically tracing the development of Eno’s iconoclastic musical approaches—including a careful re-examination of the oft-told and perhaps apocryphal tale of Eno’s “discovery” of ambient music while convalescing to a low-volume recording of 18th century harp music—Sheppard, perhaps unsurprisingly, pays closest attention to Eno’s name-making tenure with Roxy Music, his quartet of watershed experimental rock albums, and his 1970s collaborations with Robert Fripp, David Bowie and Talking Heads. Sheppard’s study of these periods, as well as Eno’s rigorous employment of both systems and accidents, yield countless great stories: co-producer Tony Visconti’s four-year-old son spontaneously “composing” the opening of Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’ on the piano during the Low sessions; Eno convincing David Byrne to jog on the spot to create his breathless delivery on Talking Heads’ ‘Drugs’; or the transformation of ashtrays, lampshades and wooden flooring into musical instruments. Along the way Sheppard offers an unexpected defense of Paul McCartney, and suggests that Eno may bear some responsibility for Phil Collins’ solo career. (Readers are advised to refer to Sheppard’s footnotes, which contain some of his funniest findings, such as Eno’s contractual clause that he never be obligated to set foot in Los Angeles, or the time he signed autographs as Quincy Jones for excitable Japanese Michael Jackson fans.) The only real flaw with On Some Faraway Beach—other than Sheppard’s over-use of certain adjectives, “sanguine” especially—is his compression of the last quarter-century of Eno’s life into what reads like an annotated CV. Apparently, at some point Eno’s near-superhuman productivity simply exhausted Sheppard. I can’t entirely blame him. Eno's only in his 60s now, and it's easy to see him re-inventing everything well into our new millennium.

Gould

“I have decided to tell Gould’s story—really a linked set of ideas about perception, consciousness, time, and silence—not as a story but as a single contested piece considered from a variety of angles.” There have been some stern grievances with Kingwell’s approach to writing about Gould, one of Canada’s most beloved and enigmatic icons, but to be fair he makes his M.O. explicit from the start, and it’s not like there’s any lack of other conventional biographies of Gould available to those who crave a more well-behaved, chronologically-ordered series of facts and anecdotes. Having said that, Kingwell does court contention, having written a slim volume that isn’t quite biography and isn’t quite philosophy. Were he to concentrate his energies on fully realizing either of these things he would likely have had to compose something far bulkier and daunting.

Gould

The chapters, each pertaining to a single idea that connects, however tenuously, to Gould’s life and work, are short. Titles include ‘Memory,’ ‘Existence,’ ‘Quodlibet,’ and, of course, ‘Genius.’ The overall structure is prismatic. Kingwell’s observations on each topic form stimulating chains of epiphanies. He writes elegantly about the inherent constraints of several artistic forms and the challenges they pose. (Kingwell begins his ‘Architecture’ chapter with the oft-used claim that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” subsequently explaining that when taken to its logical conclusion such a claim implies that “the only appropriate reaction to music is more music, an absurd position if taken literally.” I immediately wondered if Kingwell had read Geoff Dyer’s sublime But Beautiful, which in fact suggests that much of the history of jazz is exactly that: articulate musical responses to other music.) Whether or not these build toward a satisfying conclusion—conclusion in the argumentative, rather than the musical, sense—is open to debate.

The Oblique Strategies

In the end I got a lot out of both books, and found that so many of Kingwell’s preoccupations while examining Gould's life and work dovetailed nicely into themes raised by Eno’s life and work. It would be great if Kingwell could apply this same approach to an Eno book. Come to think of it, it would be great if Sheppard could apply his rigorous research and cultural and critical insight to a book about Gould. A trade-off—sounds like one of Eno’s Oblique Strategies. What about it, guys?

2000s: the decade in books

For the moment at least, most of us still read books that take up physical space. Scanning our libraries to recall a decade’s reading requires movement. We walk from shelf to shelf in search of that terrific title that nearly slipped our minds. I’ve always sensed a kinship between walking, writing, and reading, the steps taken from one word to the next, the meditative spell we’re placed under, the small choices that lead us farther from home, or deeper into story. I’m going to write about my most treasured books of the century’s first decade as I find them, slip them off the shelf, flip through the pages, and remember.


Austerlitz
The late W.G. Sebald was very much the walker/writer, crafting unclassifiable books we’ll call novels for ease. He meets a man in Antwerp, an architectural historian concerned “with the shape and the self-contained nature of discreet things.” Their friendship develops over decades of accidental encounters. Slowly we learn Austerlitz’s story. He was an infant refugee on a kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. He was raised by a Calvinist preacher in Wales. Slowly Sebald unravels one of the most singular of Holocaust narratives, an immensely engrossing tale of memories recovered. And Sebald’s prose moves not ponderously but one step at a time, stopping to take note of faces and places, objects, voices, hidden spaces, the palimpsest and residue of history. As you read him you sense that the book could go anywhere, yet in the end it only goes where it was meant to all along.


Here is Where We Meet
Did John Berger ever run into Sebald on one of his walks? It could still happen. In the first chapter of Here is Where We Meet Berger encounters his mother while wandering through Lisbon—he recognizes her by her walk. She’s been dead for 15 years. Now in his 80s, Berger remains one of literature’s great nomads. Moving from city to city, meeting or remembering people from his past, this is his most visionary writing of the last decade. To read him is to feel as though you're touching something, smelling something. He gives us back the sensual world like few writers can.


The Body Artist
“You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.” Don DeLillo ended the 20th century with a mammoth masterwork. He started the 21st with this compact, fragmentary novella. I for one think it's been vastly under-appreciated. The first part describes a domestic morning with startling clarity, a couple, moving in the same space, sometimes listening to each other, sometimes blinded by routine. Someone dies. Soon after a ghostly visitor appears. The titular protagonist interprets the whole experience into something essentially wordless, yet her performance is hauntingly described through DeLillo’s prose.


Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson’s the patron saint of fuck-ups. He renders lyrical the depths of human folly. This sprawling epic about Americans embroiled in grotesque misadventures at home and abroad is a blackly comic history of Vietnam, among other things. A CIA operative whose uncle is some goofy 20th century Colonel Kurtz; the Houston brothers, familiar from Johnson’s Angels; a Canadian aid worker and Seventh Day Adventist: these are our sherpas along the mountain. Misunderstandings, dubious ambitions, and fraught friendships forged with Southeast Asians line an unruly tale both hilarious and appalling.


2666
What to make of the posthumous English-language celebrity of Roberto Bolaño, so eerily in keeping with the morbid enigmas buried in his stories? The Savage Detectives would have been enough to cement his reputation, but then we got this. He wanted this last work divided into five novellas, so as to accumulate more royalties for his children after his death. This request was thankfully denied—I hope his kids are eating well. The colossal power of 2666 lies partly in its sustained tonal focus, which tethers together the stories of adventurous young European scholars, an American journalist, an elusive German novelist, a lonely single father, and a number of disparate Mexicans linked to the murder of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s fictionalized Ciudad Juarez, into a global geometry of trauma, longing, and obsession. It’s one of the most exhausting and harrowing books I’ve ever read. At times I felt nausea. I can’t wait to read it again.


Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell’s eloquently structured Russian doll novel cradles within it science fiction, a Grishamesque corporate thriller, and letters, spanning the 19th century to the post-apocalyptic future. Tales within tales, each one read by a character in the next, build upon one another until they pass through the mirror in the book’s centre. The individual narratives are mostly simple to describe, but the book as a whole defies synopsis. Sorry.


The Ongoing Moment
Geoff Dyer’s best work since his truly sublime jazz chronicle But Beautiful is a paragon of associational rigour. (Mostly) American photography is his vast subject, though it's wonderful when he makes room for Hiroshi Sugimoto, say. A disciple of Berger, whom he wrote about when very young, Dyer’s guided from image to image by impulses founded in history, biography, art criticism, conjecture, and the labyrinth of magnetic details in the photos themselves that catch his magpie eye.


Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami is always fun, always extravagantly imaginative, always sequestering his heroes in some sort of wilderness—that’s usually when the weirdness starts. A teenage runaway and an aging simpleton share a destiny. Guidance is gleaned from cats and rocks. There’s a murder mystery enveloping this coming of age novel, among the most ambitious in Murakami’s oeuvre.


The Fortress of Solitude, Then We Came to the End
They came from Brooklyn, but only the first, Jonathan Lethem’s quasi-fantastical, pop culture-addled, semi-autobiographical epic, is a remembrance of Brooklyn past, a story of interracial friendship founded in music, graffiti, art, comics, and broken families. Oh yeah, and a super-powered ring. Joshua Ferris’ insightful, very funny novel, a terrific debut, written in first-person collective, is actually set in a Chicago advertising agency. It’s about work, but it’s also about fleeting forms of togetherness.


Miracles of Life
J.G. Ballard is the third author in this little library walk to have died sometime in our new century’s first decade. (Oddly enough he had a special kinship with Jean Baudrillard, who also died, back in 2007, and whom I’m still getting around to reading someday. And speaking of kinships, that David Cronenberg chose to adapt Ballard’s Crash for the screen surely marks one of the most uncannily apt collaborations between two complimentary sensibilities in the history of art.) Whether through science-fiction or merely something like it, Ballard did so much to make us look differently at our minds and bodies, at our memories and our social strategies, at our technologies as extensions of ourselves, at our cities and buildings and boundaries, at our fantasies, perhaps most of all. But his final book was a memoir, and while he published a number of excellent novels in the 2000s, all of them variations on the same, deeply compelling narrative, this memoir somehow seems to me the greater accomplishment. (Is this the case as well with David Thomson? I treasure his writing on film more than almost any other critic, and The Whole Equation is now among my favourite books about Hollywood ever. But Try to Tell the Story, in which he recalls his postwar London childhood and his father's double life, awakens his readers to something altogether different in his prose, something to do with his ability to connect with the sense of loss and wild ambition he writes about with regards to Orson Welles, for example.) From Miracles of Life, I remember especially how he wrote about the corpses he would dissect in medical school as palimpsests of experience, how he wrote about Saskatchewan, where he spent some time in his youth, how he wrote about coping with the loss of his wife and the mother of his children, whom he had to raise on his own while trying to maintain a career as a writer. It’s so strange when writers die. They only existed for most of us on the page, and on the page they live still. Somehow I can still hear Ballard’s voice.


Invisible
Paul Auster—another Brooklynite!—has been on fire as of late—seven novels in ten years. He works diligently on stories that tumble into other stories, testaments to the fact that every one of us is a storyteller. Invisible may be the best of his recent work—in any case it’s the latest. (He’s but one of a number of novelists who churned out one solid book after another in the 2000s. I think of so many good ones from César Aira, Cormac McCarthy, Horacio Castellanos Moya, José Saramago… But I’m trying to draw this to a close here.) A man recalls a turning point in his youth, when he met a Satanic scholar and his lovely, younger wife, who endow the youth with knowledge of eros and death. This story, the first part of the book, is sent to an old friend, a professional writer, who then assumes the authorship of what we’re reading, and delves into still more perverse secrets in the first man’s past. Both of these men, the authors of the first and second parts, have much in common with Auster, but these commonalities highlight the trickster in Auster above all. Divided into four parts, Invisible shifts from place to place, from author to author, from first to second to third person, and then to the form of a diary. Some of these shifts seem designed as coping mechanisms; some imply crucial discrepancies. These discrepancies prompt the question: when does the past become fiction? Is it not happening every moment? And is storytelling not the most durable balm against our histories being swallowed into the fog?

The Moviegoer: Walker Percy's great novel blurs, complicates and poeticizes the American dream life

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, first published in 1961 and set in New Orleans, begins with protagonist Binx Bolling visiting his aunt. She gives him some bad news, and his internal response to this is conveyed to us, unencumbered by what would seem to be required exposition, through his first-person narration:

“She squeezed me tighter than ever. ‘Scotty is dead. Now it’s up to you. It’s going to be difficult for you but I know you’re going to act like a soldier.’ This was true. I could easily act like a solider. Was that all I had to do?

“It reminds me of a movie I saw last month out by Lake Pontchartrain…”

No information about who Scotty even is gets in the way of this, and the description of the experience of going to the movie near Lake Pontchartrain is much longer and more evocative—more important—than Binx’s grave meeting with the family member to which he’s closest. The unnamed movie is about an amnesiac who loses his whole life as it once was, but then starts a new one which actually seems pretty good. But Binx is just as interested in recalling his conversation with the proprietor of the cinema afterwards, because Binx, avid moviegoer that he is, cannot even enter a theatre until he knows something about the theatre itself or the people who operate it. Like a guy who can’t eat in a restaurant until he’s shook hands with the cooks, his experience of the movies is obsessively holistic, not a plunge into the fictive world on screen but a sought-after sense of awareness that can only be summoned up by taking in both the movie and his place within it as viewer:

“…it was here in Tivoli that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra. It was during a rerelease of Red River a couple of years ago that I became aware of the first faint stirrings of curiosity about the particular seat I sat in, the lady in the ticket booth… As Montgomery Clift was whipping John Wayne in a fist fight, an absurd scene, I made a mark on my seat arm with my thumbnail. Where, I wondered, will this particular piece of wood be twenty years from now, 543 years from now?”

There’s another fascinating moment where Binx describes going to a screening of Panic in the Streets, which was filmed on location in New Orleans, and recognizing the very street outside the theatre on screen. This experience grants Binx’s home place a sense of “certification.” By seeing a movie which shows his neighbourhood, it becomes possible “to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

I’d first heard of The Moviegoer while reading The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer’s wonderfully associative book about photography published just a few years ago. Dyer proposes that Binx sees the world, specifically its objects, as though through William Eggleston’s camera, citing a moment in The Moviegoer where Binx is getting dressed one morning and is arrested by a sudden awareness of the objects he’s placing in his pockets. As a Southerner approaching his 30th birthday, a man whose sole talent, by his own admittance, is making money—or as he puts it, “selling mutual funds to widows and dagos”—a man who even when speaking to the reader in this private, interior voice, describes himself, rather hilariously, as someone deeply pleased by acts of perfect conformity, Binx’s sole access to his soul’s true yearnings arises only from such moments as the ones in the theatre in Tivoli or when he fills his pockets with items, moments during which some hidden light is cast upon the mundane, filling it with some glowing presence. These moments, he tells us, remind him of something he calls “the search,” something that first struck him when he was injured years ago somewhere in “the Orient,” something which “anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” An everydayness Binx, in his schizophrenic manner, is carefully cultivating.

This tension between perfecting conformity and feeling the grip of “the search” reminded me not of a movie but of another book… about movies. James Harvey’s Movie Love in the Fifties, a somewhat loghorrretic but in many ways deeply satisfying study of precisely what the title implies, draws us into the psychology of the postwar American dream life, where the props of reality took on more cinematic qualities. He describes military training in the 50s this way:
“…the traditional sort of ‘war games’ they put us through in basic training, with gas masks and bayonets and live ammo going off just above our heads, felt like some historical re-enactment, as unreal as playing cowboys and Indians again…”

Harvey zeroes in on the strange dialogue between the faux-optimism of postwar ideology and the movies, American movies, the ostensible propagandic vehicles of this ideology.

Binx, presumably, given this un-articulated experience in “the Orient,” has actually been a solider, yet it’s revealing that he reassures us that for his aunt he can “act like a soldier.” Did the movies teach him how? I finally got around to reading The Moviegoer this past week because I thought it would be a good thing to read while in the thick of the Toronto International Film Festival, where I annually immerse myself in what is surely an unhealthy deluge of movies. It’s interesting, then, to find Percy’s book, so exacting in its invoking of sense of place—far ahead of the academic study of the phenomena—is very much about the way that movies are not just escapism, nor, obviously, just a source of knowledge and understanding of self and the world, but are somehow both at once. There are moments in the novel when Binx makes it sound like he goes to the movies to idle away the hours between work, dating his secretaries or socializing pleasantly with his family. Yet it seems that the movies in their subliminal way are cumulatively conspiring against such pacification—they are thrusting him back into “the search.” And for this reason, The Moviegoer may just be required reading for all of us addicted to the hovering rectangle of light.