Homesick

Homesick becomes the defining road book for a new era—an explosive, mind-altering journey across our scorched yet sacred land that climaxes in a radiant vision of America’s future. 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.