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Mission To America
A Novel
by Walter Kirn
FILM:
The "Thumbsucker" author returns with a novel about a man from an off-the-grid Montana religious sect who leaves home on a mission to find converts.
Doubleday, 288 pages
10/11/2005
$23.95
ISBN: 038550764X
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Entertainment Weekly Karen Karbo
Walter Kirn may be America's best satirist without a cable-TV show. [14 Oct 2005, p.157]
Publishers Weekly
This may be the Livingston, Mont.-based Kirn's best work yet. [25 Jul 2005, p.38]
The New York Times Book Review Paul Gray
With this novel, Walter Kirn has ventured into deep waters.
Library Journal Robin Nesbitt
Kirn (Thumbsucker) takes an interesting look at contemporary life from two outsiders' perspectives. Looking at America this way raises many questions about belief, consumerism, and what we call modern life. [1 Oct 2005, p.67]
San Francisco Chronicle Timothy Peters
Kirn has created an insightful and drolly funny tale that skewers and celebrates contemporary American life.
Boston Globe John Dicker
Whatever serious point [Kirn]'s trying to make about the crowded marketplace of American spirituality is buried beneath his enjoyable, if not terribly illuminating, satirical ethnography.
Salon Laura Miller
If only Tom Wolfe were a little bit brighter, he could be a novelist like Walter Kirn. Kirn picks an aspect of contemporary life... and uses fiction to map its nooks and crannies.
The Onion A.V. Club Donna Bowman
Walter Kirn's Mission To America adds the wide-eyed certainty of religious conviction to this brother-from-another-planet scenario in an attempt to lampoon the shallow spiritual neediness of the rich and strange. But its comic ambitions fit uneasily with its freak-show characters.
The New Yorker
One can clearly discern the author attempting to skewer the consumerism and the spiritual emptiness of contemporary society. But the critique is vitiated by the fact that the community this society is being measured against is so patently silly... and that the main characters exist only to illustrate the various themes.
Wall Street Journal Joseph Bottum
We see the joke in "Mission to America," but it is not nearly as funny as it ought to be.
Washington Post Jana Richman
If a book jacket touts its author as "one of the most acute observers of contemporary American life that we have," that author must do more than point out the obvious.
Los Angeles Times Marc Weingarten
In "Mission to America,"... the battle lines are too neatly drawn, the themes glaringly self-evident. This subject might have been better suited as one of Kirn's magazine essays. [15 Oct 2005]
PopMatters Jeff Gomez
Despite everything in the novel that doesn't work -- and most of it doesn't -- Kirn is still a smart author who manages to slip in the occasional spot-on observation.
Kirkus Reviews
One of Kirn's characters is lauded for possessing, above all else, "judiciousness." It's a quality the author could take up. [1 Aug 2005, p.807]
USA Today Bob Minzesheimer
A disappointment.... It's just not that funny or biting and ends too predictably.
 The average user rating for this book is 0.0 (out of 10) based on 0 User Votes
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