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Chargement... American Spirit: A Novelpar Dan Kennedy
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. American Spirit by Dan Kennedy is a clinical examination of a soul in crisis. Suffering from a potentially serious undiagnosed health ailment, Matthew, a fortysomething executive has additional complications to contend with: a cheating spouse, loss of youth and loss of job. Faced with these dire matters, Matthew tries to cobble together some meaning and direction in his life. Before taking his one-man sideshow on the road west, he attempts various balms for his soul: therapy, drinking, jogging, yoga and crafting classes until gun ownership and a foray into drug dealing seems like a wise choice. Though I admired the many searing and sometimes poetic observations about American culture and quest for self-help, the bulk of the story is told at a cold distance that doesn’t inspire compassion toward Matthew’s plight. Kennedy has proved his talent for the humorous in Loser Goes First, but don’t go looking for hilarity here aside from a few choice passages such as when Matthew tries to understand millennials or teenage girls’ fascination with vampires. From an ugly and sometimes tedious first half, the book improves along the way and ultimately reaches a satisfying conclusion. The book is worth experiencing mainly for the occasional but gloriously caustic indictments of American culture. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Kennedy's anti-hero of choice is corporate pop-culture advertising executive Matthew Harris, whose crumbling marriage, dubious health, and sudden unemployment leave him in an existential free fall that, let's be honest, he doesn't handle very well. While many of Matthew's antics are genuinely funny, his rambling internal dialogue that comprises a decent majority of the book's narration is an awe-inspiring stream-of-consciousness philosophical diatribe that volleys back and forth between genuine insight and delusional rationalizing. Matthew's journey turns out to be a spiritual one, albeit not the same as you would find in Eat, Pray, Love (which Matthew reads and repeatedly references indirectly throughout the book). Instead, Matthew embarks on more of the emotionally-stunted vision quest through a soulless cultural wasteland, but far less cynicism and nihilism than you might expect. Kennedy sows enough compassion and hope into Matthew's paranoid tirades to keep him being a sympathetic character no matter how wildly off-target his path takes him. ( )