An Englishwoman's amused yet sympathetic journey through the New
Age culture of the American West. McGrath travels through New
Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado on a kind of cynic's
pilgrimage, to learn about New Age spirituality. On her journey she
meets a wide cross-section of the walking wounded: people with
remembered past lives, psychics, princesses from lost subterranean
cities, damaged inner children, people "working on themselves." Her
account makes a fine contribution to the tradition of witty foreign
commentary on US culture, and her approach to New Age spirituality
- skeptical, with an eye for the hilarious and absurd - is
thoroughly entertaining. Some of what she describes is devastating;
in a chapter on the New Age appropriation of Native American
culture, for instance, McGrath quotes one of her white seekers as
saying that the Indians who are addicted to alcohol and gambling
aren't really Indians: They're "reincarnations of 19th-century
white men, paying back bad karma.... Real Indians are spiritually
pure." McGrath is a rare phenomenon: a European who can report on
American racism and commercial excess without sounding
self-righteous. It is not until the final chapter that we learn the
extent of her own spiritual despair: that she has been depressed
and suicidal throughout her adult life, looking for solace in
various kinds of therapy and drugs. This section adds a
self-reflectiveness and empathy to her story, making it clear that
she identifies with people who are seeking meaning in their lives
and that, in some ways, what brought her to the Southwest was not
so far from what draws the New Agers. McGrath achieves a balance
between mockery and understanding that is rare among commentators
on contemporary spirituality. (Kirkus Reviews)
"McGrath is a cool-eyed chronicler of a dispossessed generation – philosophical, astute and ultimately unforgiving. This is no pseudo rock'n'roll road trip, but an accessible and insightful study of the modern condition. The final autobiographical chapter is breathtaking."
DEBORAH BOSLEY, 'Literary Review'
"McGrath meets the nation's lost souls of the New Age. A 267-year-old princess from the tribe of Atlantis, a technoshaman, an alien who talks to Barbie dolls, an overweight angel and a prince who will never die all impress her with their certainties as much as they depress her with their chronic self-awareness. It's an ambitious debut: McGrath has a keen sense for deadpan descriptions of off-kilter encounters, and an acute knack for deflating the Myth."
EMER BRIZZOLARA, 'Ikon'
"Fortifying herself with booze, cigarettes and a useful amount of asperity and common sense, McGrath painstakingly trawls the aisles of the spiritual supermarket. She writes beautifully about the terrain, offers deliciously dyspeptic observations…and is very funny on the sense of spiralling dislocation which arises from being confronted not just with unfamiliar behaviour but with 'an entirely inner architecture'."
MICK BROWN, 'Daily Telegraph'
McGrath has a fine, questing mind, a splendid eye for detail and a healthily cynical attitude. Confronted at every turn – in her deliciously sardonic picaresque travelogue through America's south-western desert states – by the strange, the sinister and the just plain barmy…she maintains a fine, dense and colourful narrative that brings the desert landscape and the loony-tune New Agers vividly to life."
NICK CURTIS, 'Financial Times'
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