Motel Nirvana: Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert - Hardcover

McGrath, Melanie

3.13

31 ratings by Goodreads

9780312143725: Motel Nirvana: Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312143729 ISBN 13: 9780312143725

Publisher: Picador USA, 1996

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A British woman traveling the American Southwest surveying the range of the New Age movement describes meetings with UFOlogists, angels, inner children, and nature worshippers

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Review:

A 30-year-old British woman travels around the southwestern United States, the focal point of the New Age movement and a desert landscape where "someone you can rely upon to have an opinion about soap opera or McDonald's turns out to have seen angels in her backyard and the man who sells you a cup of coffee thinks himself a reincarnation of Nefertiti." McGrath struggles to maintain a sense of ironic amusement as she encounters an assortment of eccentric folks, from a pudgy, sexually confused "angel" to a "convergence" of people who have achieved immortality--or claim to, at any rate--by deciding that they don't feel like dying. American readers may find some difficulty warming up to McGrath's British prose style, but the humor and insight in Motel Nirvana are well worth the effort. --Ron Hogan

From the Back Cover:

"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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