And when he does attempt a connection, it seems doomed. He finally proposes marriage to his suicidal cousin Kate, but even Kate seems to understand the proposal as an unfortunate gesture, a death-house prank.

Writing in the New York Review of Books in 2005, Joyce Carol Oates identified Binx as one of a string of solitary, cool, self-absorbed males in American fiction—other examples including Saul Bellow’s Joseph from Dangling Man, and the narrator of Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision. I took Oates’s critique as personally as if she had been questioning my own character. These were my role models she was writing so scathingly about. If they were cold, self-dramatizing narcissists, what was I?

The short answer is that for many of the years I spent re-reading The Moviegoer, I was just as confused as Binx. I certainly aspired to be every bit as cool and every bit as noncommittal. It didn’t work. It turned out to be a lousy strategy for, as the life coaches say, professional and interpersonal success. I took a Binxian approach to women, which is to say I told them lie after lie even as I assiduously pursued them. I turned my lunch hour at work into two or three hours of drinking, and I thought Binx would have been proud.

I don’t mean to suggest that The Moviegoer messed me up or corrupted me. But maybe it validated my impulse toward the passive and disconnected. It gave me permission to be the fuck-up I always thought I could be. My girlfriends, unimpressed with the literary influences behind my evasions and lies, dumped me. My bosses, with no use for an employee who disappeared for hours on end, fired me.

Re-reading is essentially a childish act. Kids are serial re-readers. Kids want to return again and again to the world they find in a particular book, to try it on for size, to imagine themselves there, to take a few laps around their alternative world before returning home. Part of the fun is knowing you can make the trip anytime, as many times as you want, and always come back safe.

One of the clichés of literature is that one really can’t read the same book twice. The idea is that with each re-reading, the reader brings new experiences, new insights, new emotional depth to the book, thus transforming it. But this credits readers with too much power and books with too little. Certain books have a way of stripping us of the emotional and intellectual armature that is commonly called maturity. One of my friends, for example, once told me that she never has been able to read Winnie the Pooh to her kids without crying.

In the years since I first read The Moviegoer, I married, became a father, and learned some of the tricks we all learn for passing as an adult in an adult world. But reading The Moviegoer annually has given me an excuse to stay in contact with my 20-year-old self. Going back to Binx’s New Orleans every year is, in fact, a little like going to a reunion: Binx and Kate and the various versions of me all getting together to check each other out and see who has thrived and who looks really bad.