Chin Music: A Novel of the Jazz Age

I see now that a book, like a life, is a pastiche of plagiarisms. To write mine, I have borrowed and bent and followed in the footsteps of those who fancied America the golden Medina, a hope long since sterile but once fecund as the rivers Captain Smith fished. Somnambulists of a vanished dream, they would surely feel, were they to pass through the garbage-strewn streets of this country, through the hungry and tortured cries of the night, that they had wakened to a fallen world. Or would they? Perhaps despite the omens drear, the land cold from the quickening of greed, they still would hear the varied carols of America singing.