But Kirn has other, more subtly-shaded ideas that don't involve my summer reading simple-mindedness - both on a character-rich level, and a broader-scaled philosophical approach, the “phenomenological crux of social mobility,” as one secondary character expressly refers to the telling of blockbuster tales. First of all — as it is explained to an often distracted, rushed Mason — “Would you stop acting like you need to go somewhere long enough to listen to the answer? You do that a lot, you know. It’s rude.”
In addition to this criticism of the sense of American distantness that Mason has picked up since starting his travels, toward the end of the book the same secondary character is asked to finish a story, at which point she balks at the why-bother pointlessness: “We come in midway with people; we leave midway. We don’t always get to hear the end of things.”
With fully realized and considered characters — both main and minor — vivid settings, evocative themes, a potent admixture of gravitas and episodic quirks, we should then be more than content to appreciate the refreshingly wry and compelling continuity of a cohesive, wide-scale novel such as Mission To America, leaving our short-attention-span expectations and "onslaught of suddenlys" at the title page. A mission to long-haul narrative force awaits.
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