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From one of our most admired and visible young writers, a superb new novel about the collision between the forces of faith and an overstimulated, overfed, spiritually overextended America.
Doubleday
October 2005
Featuring: Mason LaVerle
288 pages
ISBN: 038550764X
Hardcover
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Contemporary
Mason LaVerle is a young man on a mission—a mission to
America. He was raised in a remote Montana town in the
church of the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles, a matriarchal,
not-quite-Christian, almost New-Ageish sect that, like the
Amish, keeps a wary distance from mainstream life. But the
Apostles face a dwindling membership, so Mason is sent on
an outreach mission with another young man to bring back
converts—and, more specifically, brides. And so these two
naive believers head off in a van to encounter the
contemporary scene in all its bewildering, seductive
diversity. They prosyletize at malls, passing out leaflets
in parking garages based on the condition of their cars and
their bumper stickers. Eventually, they make their way to a
gilded Colorado ski town, where, while promoting their un-
American message of humble, serene, optimistic fatalism,
Mason finds himself courting a young woman who used to pose
for Internet porn sites, and his partner becomes the live-
in guru of a guilt-ridden billionaire with chronic bowel
complaints. Meanwhile, back in Montana, the Apostles are
facing schism and extinction as their beloved leader, the
Seeress, drifts toward death. The mounting pressures lead
Mason to the brink of missionary madness. Walter Kirn is one of the most acute observers of
contemporary American life that we have. In Mission to
America, he harnesses that gift to a satirical yet moving
tale of a stranger in a strange land that just happens to
be our own.
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