Product Description When Matthew, a forty-something media executive, finds his job, health, and marriage crumbling, he goes native: Lives in his car. Dips his toe in drug-running. Contemplates song lyrics. Takes a really good pottery class. Before long he’s on a stumbling, agonizingly funny vision quest that takes him from a strip-mall parking lot to Yellowstone National Park 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 and hilarious debut novel, Dan Kennedy gives us an everyman who takes us to the neon-lit edges of contemporary American life. Review “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 wi