The last gentleman

This is, I think, Walker Percy's finest novel though others will say The Moviegoer. In essence, this book is the American version of Dostoievsky's The Idiot. The work explores the strangeness of existence, a recurrent theme of WP, owing to his view that the world is not man's oyster and that man is essentially a wayfarer in this world. The prose is limpid and worth a read for its own merit. No American author has ever explored the human condition better.