MISSION TO AMERICA by Walter Kirn

Reviewed by Ari Glogower

Walter Kirn’s latest work “Mission To America” ranges far and goes nowhere. This book, a protean mass of ill conceived images and half-baked humor leaves the reader aching for some tight, neat purposeful prose. The story line follows the adventures of two young men from a reclusive religious community tucked into a Montanan bluff. Their mission, to find new female converts to diversify the community’s inbred gene pool, results in many not-hilarious encounters with modernity and produces trite insights into overplayed themes of gender, commercialism and the like.

Kirn’s problem is not a lack of creativity, and he peppers each page with bizarre details and inventive asides. His description of the community, a new-age theocracy populated by Whole Foods brand reps, encompasses a colorful array of habits and beliefs. The reader meets the deity Lady Vegetalis and an economy based on the exchange of virtue coupons. The reader learns that once, during the spring moon of Snake Emergence the group’s leader Aunt Patricia – with a little help from Lom-Bard-Ok-Thon - halted an epidemic racing through the slums of northern Peru. And so on.

The work ultimately suffers from the lack of authorial discipline and editorial oversight necessary to produce a coherent, cogent work. At times one gets the impression that Kirn simply stitched his every stray thought into a vaguely narrative form. This time, the proverbial writer’s trash can remained empty. The result is at best weak satire, and more likely nonsense.