The back cover copy:

At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a top television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination.

And then the dream--and the dream-making--become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture, to impose, a pattern on his own, and America's, past, present, and future.

Back cover copy:

"Child of Godard and Coca-Cola..."

That's what David Bell, twenty-eight-year-old New York television executive, calls himself. Living among fractured images, remote conversations, dark hints of distant wars and casual sex, David Bell feels as if he's stumbled into the obsessed world of a contemporary movie. To escape, he must make a movie himself.

And so, armed with his favorite camera, sharing a camper truck with a former fighter pilot, a drunken visionary, and a sculptress, David Bell sets out on a mad, careening expedition into the Great American Unknown...