Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

In his follow-up to My War: Killing Time in Iraq, Buzzell offers a bleak book, a dour and humorless account of a five-month trip through America following the spirit, if not the actual route, of Jack Kerouac's travels in On the Road. Buzzell doesn't help his case much by introducing himself in his first chapter as "a no-name writer" who claims to have left his wife and "week-old" son to take an assignment to "'write a love letter to Kerouac'" only to blow it off and wander aimlessly searching for "grime, alleys and alcohol." And after a beautiful tribute to his dying mother in chapter two, that's basically what Buzzell presents: a memoir of drinking his way from his California home through Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska, taking day-labor jobs with no health care that remind him "what it is like to be an American"%E2%80%94even though he seems to have a bottomless bank account with which to support himself. Other than a few casual and unexplained snipes at Barack Obama, Buzzell's unsurprising reporting doesn't rise above banal observations like "The lady working the front desk looked straight out of a David Lynch movie." When he ends up in Detroit%E2%80%94the location for almost the book's entire final half%E2%80%94he realizes that "there was absolutely nothing original that I was doing." Unfortunately, the reader will have come to that realization well before that. (Sept.)