 Motel Nirvana
first published on 07 August, 1995 (HarperCollins)
Synopsis:
Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert: A book about the New Age movement and its American heartland. It concerns the author's travels around the south-western United States of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and her encounters with some of that region's most unusual communities and individuals.
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Excerpt:
At night she took sleeping pills, which did not make her sleep, and during the day she took uppers, which did not make her feel awake. Often she would catch herself hallucinating on the journey into work. She lost her spatial sense, she saw everything in two dimensions and as though it were at a far distance.
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Reviews:
'McGrath is a rare phenomenon: a European who can report on American racism and commercial excess without sounding self-righteous...McGrath achieves a balance between mockery and understanding that is rare among commentators on contemporary spirituality.'
Kirkus Reviews
'Like Jack Kerouac's On the Road but with laughs.'
Independent on Sunday
'A vivid and entertaining travelogue.'
Marie Claire
'Cynical, incisive, deadpan funny and sad.'
Sydney Morning Herald
'Vivid and compelling...a kind of Pilgrim's Progress for the end of the twentieth century, always provocative but never self-satisfied.'
Observer
'A brilliant writer.'
Dervla Murphy
'McGrath is a cool-eyed chronicler of a dispossessed generation - philosophical, astute and ultimately unforviging. This is no pseudo rock'n'roll trip, but an accessible and insightful study of the modern condition.'
Literary Review
'Fortifying herself with booze, cigarettes and a useful amount of asperity and common sense, McGrath painstakingly trawls the aisles of the spiritual supermarket. She writers 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 foreign inner architecture.''
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 American's south-western desert states - by the strange, the sinister and the just plain barmy...she maintain a fine, dense and colourful narrative that brings the desert landscape and the loony-tune new Agers vividly to life.'
Financial Times
'With deadpan wit, Melanie McGrath reminds me why I came to America. Just like a warped episode of The Wonderful World of Disney, an On the Road for the New Age. Had tears rolling down my cheek. Couldn't put it down.'
Revolt
'A serious record of one woman's desolate journey in the desert...She pins down the bikers and the Bloody Marys, the Mormons, the exhausted Indians, the yearning divorcees, the ancient air conditioners, the scorpions, the centipedes - the motels themselves, all strange beyond words. My own desert-rat mom doesn't like anything, but she'd like this.'
The Washington Post
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