Binx Bolling, a stockbroker in New Orleans, spends his evenings at the movies and his days in what he calls 'the malaise,' the sense that ordinary life is a kind of death. Percy's first novel won the National Book Award and introduced American fiction to a new kind of protagonist: the searcher who knows something is wrong but cannot name it. The prose is precise and melancholy, the setting vivid with Gulf Coast light. Binx's search is never completed, only acknowledged. The novel offers no cure for the malaise, only the recognition that the search itself is what matters.