Lost in America: A Dead-end Journey
by Colby Buzzell
Harper
In his new travelogue Lost in America, 30-something San Franciscan Colby Buzzell claims to be 'a mop prodigy': good at wielding a mop.
Big on self-mockery, Buzzell more resembles a literary prodigy.
The loner autodidact who never attended college was praised by books icon Kurt Vonnegut and dubbed 'the voice of a generation' by heavyweight non-fiction writer Robert Kurson for his debut My War: Killing Time in Iraq.
Half a decade on, rocked by his mother's death and son's birth, Buzzell is more unstable than ever. To find himself, the half-Korean combat veteran packs his gear and hops in his battered classic car.
For five months, he drives across America minus map, phone or destination in homage of beat novelist Jack Kerouac's 1957 biographical novel On the Road.
Buzzell heads along Nevada's US 50, which Life magazine described in 1986 as 'the Loneliest Road in America'. Soaked in booze, Buzzell goes through: Cheyenne, Wyoming; Omaha, Nebraska; Salt Lake City, Utah; Des Moines, Iowa; and Detroit, Michigan where he photographs derelict buildings' interiors, before reaching his old haunt, New York. En route, in one scene he drinks two bottles of wine then, failing to find his Detroit hotel room's bed, hits the sofa. His story would be pointless, were it not for the Kerouac riff and the resonance of his plight, which mirrors the demise of the nation.