American Spirit: A Novel
"If it’s hard to make the premise ofAmerican Spirit—unemployed man spends his days drinking in parking lot—sound interesting, imagine how much more difficult it would be to write it compellingly. But Kennedy does exactly that. Dark humor pervades the voyage of the down-and-out white-collar professional Matthew, who struggles on his diet of thin self-deception to avoid plunging into the morass beneath: the failure of his marriage, career, and health. This is the crash after the main event, showing that one man’s fight to keep going can be every bit as enthralling as what happened to get him to the bottom. Much of the time Matthew is drunk or high, his Woolfian ramblings undercut with the barely recognized knowledge that he is not actually holding things together. This is the eponymous American spirit—foolhardy, even dangerous, but surprisingly beautiful at times—an apt description for the novel itself. Following two memoirs, Kennedy’s fiction debut is a full-throttle, white-knuckle adventure into a land of destroyed dreams, a land whose residents are so confident it makes the normal people seem crazy."—Bridget Thoreson,Booklist