Freedom from Trauma in America

Freedom from Trauma in America is a picaresque adventure featuring Paul Revere, whose comment after The Balloon and Shower Room Escape sums up the narrative quest of this novel: "We look across treetops, watching the sun emerge behind hills, its kindly heat on the glass around and inside us - we gaze at the light and the land and it gazes back, telling us that it exists how it is within us and not in and of itself outside, meaning we're human beings, each at home within ourselves." From his early escapades with Neil and their first dates with Nancy to the hyperactive dramas from the Midwest to the Golden Gate, this is a chronicle by a journal writer about recovering strength of spirit and stout-heartedness, not least after life as a child is turned upside-down. The d nouement builds from questions throughout, such as those from the chapter entitled Faces in the Jigsaw: "How is it for those who dwell in Selby...How can they live independently and yet coalesce with each other, to save the ecology dear to farmers, against genetic evolution, intensive animal farming, new machines, superstore profiteering, and John X? By compromise? Just as they are?"