Homesick

Every generation has its road book--from On the Road to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to Blue Highways. Like Jack Kerouac, who felt that "everything was dead . . . [and] dreamed of going West," best-selling novelist Walter Kirn launched his journey in post-massacre Las Vegas, setting off eastbound in his silver Jeep Cherokee. Desperate to unburden himself of the carnage that lay behind, he met an astonishing caravan of characters: dreamers, escapists, wanderers, schemers, true believers, paranoids, and skeptics--a Hopi widower, a PTSD-afflicted veteran, and an ethereal young woman who announced herself as an alien. What Kirn did not know in this pre-Covid time was that this beguiling world would soon be eclipsed. With intensely hypnotic, lyrical language, Homesick becomes a threnody for a bygone America, a deeply personal examination of our existential homesickness, and a jarring prophecy of our land's otherworldly fate in the dawning age of artificial intelligence.