Hari Kunzru : Gods Without Men

Centered around an eye-catching rock formation in the Mojave Desert,  a British Kashmiri Pandit offers a rather contemptuous  examination of the past 250 years of Euro-American consciousness.

From ethno-centric Spanish priests to renegade Mormons to bloodthirsty lawmen to UFO cultists to drug crazed hippies --to vacationing British rock stars or American hedge fund savants-- he depicts it as shallow, cruel, wacky, and destructive.  There's even a PTSD anthropologist who scorns his young wife as well as the native Americans they study. Appropriately enough, he ends up living alone in a hole in ground where he is blown up by a tear gas grenade. Ouch!  The one character who is least demented is the least  European: a Punjabi-American Sikh.  But ever he loses his mind in the end.

I suppose that every country -- like every creature -- has an ass-hole. Hari Kunzru is a rather articulate and imaginative proctologist.