Ray Davies, Laureate of the Local

Six degrees of separation – so much fun when applied as a social principle to college friends or movie stars – is useful as a literary-critical device, too. It’s a way of measuring influence and suggestivity. The strongest books link up with other books through a process Melville described (and Edmund Wilson propagated), in which “Genius the world round stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition unites them all.” In the same way, the strongest, vividest characters suggest kinship with other characters, real and imagined.

So it is with Binx Bolling, protagonist of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. No sooner had I begun to process Binx’s unmistakable points of kinship with Don Draper of Mad Men than Bill McGarvey on his America blog suggested another, more surprising kindred spirit: Ray Davies of the Kinks.

It’s not just that Davies lived for some years in New Orleans after dissolving the Kinks in the early nineties. It’s that his keen sensitivity to the local, and all the ways the local is fragile and so perpetually endangered – on the classic record We Are the Village Green Preservation Society, or in his new memoir Americana – is akin to the feeling New Orleansians have for their city.

Bill puts it perfectly:

If Binx finds some measure of hope and purpose in “the possibility of a search,” Davies’ own search is mired in what feels like nostalgia for a time that never quite existed. It’s as if he continues to feel the pain of a phantom third arm.

Raise your third arm if you too find these characters kin.

• 11 December 2013