Here's the copy from the original dust jacket:
Innocence and vitality are the hallmarks of the last American myth.
At 28, David Bell is a handsome, successful New York television executive whose fondest toy is his 16mm movie camera. Life for him is a series of oddly troubled moments, of dim lies and remote conversations, of events which intersect in some master pattern beyond delirium. There is a melancholy war in Asia; strange memos circulate through the office; men contend with each other for ownership of small enclaves of language. David's world has begun to take on some of the obsessive aspects of a contemporary movie, a film haunted by its own form and predicated on repetition.
He travels west with three friends--a former fighter pilot, a drunkard, a sculptress. Stopping in a quiet town, David begins to make a movie, attempting to reconnect with himself. From this chaotic and obscurely motivated film emerge themes exceedingly precise in nature. David is forced toward the dark heart of who he is and where he lives, a boy learning bedtime stories in the lap of the mother country.
Americana assumes near circular form, beginning but not quite ending in New York. Within this structure are contained the small town, the coastal village, the wilderness--those points of innocence which the consciousness of the American male has rendered more mythical than geographic. Deft, hallucinatory, the novel maintains an intense focus while panning whole realms of experience. The effect--of sitting directly in front of a wide-angle screen--is overwhelming. Seen as one man's self-exploration or as the search by an entire generation for itself, its place, this novel will be read with the powerful shock of recognition.
