The Moviegoer

Kate is Binx’s 25-year-old cousin, rich and complicated with a pattern of unstable behavior. The night before her wedding, several years prior to the novel’s narrative present, she survived a car accident that took the life of her fiancé. Since then, her family has worried she will have another breakdown that may result in her death. Since the accident, she has been seeing a doctor named Merle Mink, but she chooses to stop treatment with him, finding their work stifling and inauthentic. Her stepmother is Binx’s Aunt Emily and her father is Jules Cutrer. From an early age, Binx has felt responsible for Kate, who is five years younger than he. Binx impulsively proposes marriage to Kate one night before she decides to accompany him on a business trip to Chicago; they neglect to tell Kate’s family that she will be away with Binx, and her absence worries them as she has displayed suicidal tendencies in the hours before their trip. Binx and Kate marry, despite Kate’s anxieties that she will not have a successful marriage.  

Binx’s Aunt Emily is his father’s sister, and when his father died and his mother moved away, Emily took charge of Binx’s education. This move allowed Emily to take some ownership over Binx’s upbringing, and even into adulthood, she mentors Binx with a curious intensity. At times, it seems that she confuses Binx with his father, or rather, that she projects her wants for Binx’s father onto Binx, and her advice to Binx is really advice she would have given his father, whom Emily adored. Emily and Kate have a close relationship, but not a particularly warm one. Emily feels responsible for Kate and will do everything she can in her power to make sure Kate is healthy and stable, but there is an absence of love in their connection to each other.

Sharon is Binx’s current secretary, and the most recent in a string of attractive young women in Binx’s employ with, whom Binx attempts a romantic affair. She appears to hold Binx at a distance, even though she agrees to go to the Gulf Coast with him, and they spend the weekend together. Finally, Sharon’s roommate reveals to Binx that Sharon has a fiancé, which explains her erratic behavior toward Binx; no matter how she responds to his romantic gestures, at no point does Sharon consider Binx as a serious candidate for a relationship. Binx’s attraction to Sharon appears to be based primarily on her youthfulness and her close proximity to him as his employee

Binx’s mother remarried soon after Binx’s father died, and with her car-dealer husband, Roy, she has six children ranging in age from infancy to fourteen years of age. Her seventh and eldest child, Duval, drowned last summer, and since then Binx’s mother has developed a resilience to tragedy that mutes her reaction to any emotional event at all. This self-protection prevents Binx from enjoying personal and intimate conversation with his mother, but it serves her well when she loses Lonnie, her fourteen-year-old son, to illness towards the end of the novel. Binx’s mother tells Binx stories about his father that appear to help Binx feel he is making progress on his search, and her stories reveal that Binx may have inherited some of his ennui and sensitivity from his father.