The Mission (review)

The last letter Kaden Norris receives from his brother Kenny, a soldier in Iraq, execrates the war, rues the day Kenny joined the military, and urges Kaden to carry out their longstanding plan to visit their older cousin, James Morgan, a San Francisco writer who has achieved cult status with his novels PieGrinder and Dickpig. Kaden, armed with his mother's warning to take anything James tells him with a strong dose of skepticism, takes off from Iowa on a weeklong odyssey, hoping to see the sights and be seen with his celebrity relative. The visit begins badly, with James sending his girlfriend Caralie to pick Kaden up—late—at the airport, and it goes rapidly downhill from there. James spends most of his time in a cocaine and alcohol-induced haze, throwing his money around, scoring drugs, rambling on about music, cheating on Caralie, and fighting writer's block. Kaden, initially censorious of this decadence, eventually catches the rhythm of James's lifestyle himself and launches into an escalating series of chemical and sexual adventures before heading back to Iowa a week later with, to say the least, a new outlook on life. Given Kaden's moralistic critiques of James and his friends, and James and Caralie's equally strident rejoinders against passing judgment on what you don't understand, there seems to be some sort of message embedded here, but Myers doesn't nail it down. Adding to the chaos are tenuously integrated subplots concerning Kenny's death in Iraq, Mom's early life as one wild babe, Kaden's first love back in Iowa, and the life-changing awesomeness of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. The plot may be a bit of a mess, but nonetheless there's some guilty pleasure to be had in a vicarious debauch, and YAs content to let their moral compass spin may want to follow Kaden down his hellish rabbit hole.