Motel Nirvana

April 29, 1996
A British journalist checks into the American Southwest to spend a year among pilgrims in the more outre regions of inner space and among the spiritual snake-oil salesmen who serve them. McGrath's wanderings take her literally and figuratively all over the map--to spiffy, boutique-choked Santa Fe, to the ill-fated Biosphere, to a UFO drop-in at an Arizona canyon, to an orgy of "cellular intercourse" among a cult of self-professed "immortals." She intersperses passages of high humor with more sober disquisitions on the real history of Europeans in the West, from the Spanish seekers for El Dorado to the scientists working at the National Laboratory at Los Alamos. There's a glancing, supercilious tone to much of the writing here, and McGrath's prose sometimes shades into deep purple (in the city of Phoenix, "the mammon virus throbs everywhere, extending its spider legs into the lowliest corner of the city, poisoning its soul"). But McGrath concludes her first book with a passionate elegy for the indigenous cultures being plundered and homogenized by New Age hucksters--and with a moving confession of her own that brings the work to an inspired conclusion.