American Spirit: A Novel

Description

When Matthew, a forty-something media executive, finds his Manhattan job, health, and Connecticut marriage crumbling, he goes native: Drinks in his car. Gives drug-dealing a shot. Looks for direction in light-rock lyrics, takes a free crafting class at the community center, and gets in a fistfight with a meditation instructor. He also tries jogging. Soon he's on a stumbling, sideways vision quest that takes him from strip malls to national parks to a Bali medical clinic, from an unlikely romance with a Hollywood agent specializing in hot young vampire roles to extreme RVing with a disgraced Wall Street trader. In this heroic, hilarious debut novel, Dan Kennedy, a mainstay of the storytelling phenomenon The Moth, gives us an Everyman who takes us to the dark valleys and neon-lit edges of contemporary American life.

Dan Kennedy is the author of the national best seller Rock On: An Office Power Ballad and the widely acclaimed Loser Goes First, as well as a regular contributor to McSweeney's, and host of The Moth storytelling podcast and Moth StorySLAM in New York.

"Matthew's stoned, stream-of-consciousness ramblings are laugh-out-loud funny, yet interspersed with passages of startling and poignant beauty. Highly recommended, especially for fans of other sharp, iconoclastic authors like Jay McInerney, Douglas Coupland, and Eric Bogosian." -Library Journal "Dan Kennedy not only manages to craft bitter, effective comedy out of life's darker corners-egregious substance abuse, financial collapse, depression and death but he makes it look easy." -Washington Independent Review of Books "Kennedy (Rock On), host of The Moth storytelling series, has far surpassed the creation of character and conjured an entity so alive in its knowledge of impending death that we're captured in a new idea of what it's like to live." -Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Dan Kennedy's debut novel American Spirit impresses with dark humor and the immersive world of its struggling middle-aged protagonist." -LargeheartedBoy "American Spirit is very funny and has a finger pressed on the pulse of something current and weird. Reading this book reminds of how I felt upon reading Bright Lights Big City, or Generation X, great books with aimless contemporary heroes. If you've ever seen Dan Kennedy on stage, you know he can entertain like crazy, and dammit he can do it with the written word as well!" -Arthur Bradford, author of Dogwalker "American Spirit reminds us of the fearsome beauty in a free meditation class, that the right slogan on a coffee mug can change your life. This sneakily soulful novel from Dan Kennedy will make you howl out loud and believe in second chances all over again."-Benjamin Anastas, author of Too Good to Be True "Dan Kennedy is the laugh-out-loud Proust of American post-youth strivers."-Jerry Stahl, author of I, Fatty