Walker Percy's Gentilly — The Moviegoer Neighborhood

Walker Percy won the National Book Award in 1961 for *The Moviegoer*, set in Gentilly — the flat neighborhood between City Park and Lake Pontchartrain that had been swamp until mid-century. Most of the ground between the old Gentilly Ridge and the lake stayed underwater until improved drainage pumps let developers reclaim the land. By the time Percy was writing, the apartment blocks and movie theaters had gone up on what had been shallow bog.

Percy made Gentilly a stand-in for American spiritual drift through his protagonist Binx Bolling. The choice mattered. The French founded New Orleans in 1718 to control the Mississippi River Valley, naming it for strategic reasons: high ground along a sharp bend of the river, adjacent to the trading route between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John. But Gentilly wasn't that New Orleans. It was the reclaimed land, the terraced blocks carved out of swamp in the early twentieth century, the newer residential sections that appeared once the pumps worked. It was a neighborhood that existed because the technology to make it exist had arrived.

The apartment blocks and movie theaters Percy wrote about are largely still there. Drive Elysian Fields Avenue through Gentilly — one of the major north-south streets that runs from the older city out toward the lake — and you'll move through the world Binx Bolling moved through. The 1961 novel holds because Percy picked a place where the ordinary was laid bare: flat, drained, mid-century, American.