In this book, though, the retreat is a spa for recovering alcoholics, totally unlike all other rehab centers. Rather than encouraging their patients to free themselves of their addiction, the directors believe that sobriety isn’t for everyone, that you must let alcohol work its way on you.” For White, “America's Magic Mountain is about a constellation of interests. It's certainly about Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, but it is more importantly about alcoholism as a family system. It's about learning to be part of a toxic environment. This is true, in our culture, in a lot of ways. What's saddest, of course, is to see children learn how to be part of these systems. In its own hyperbolic and surreal way, my novel tries to account for that process.”

White attracted national attention for The Middle Mind, with its controversial attack on America’s intellectual malaise and failures of imagination, but while his readers may have different expectations for his nonfiction and fiction, he focuses on the connections between them. He says, “In my incorrigible mind, The Middle Mind is also a sort of novel. It is a work of the imagination. I emphasized this over and over again to people who expected me to be a journalist or an expert of some kind. I am neither. I don't ask any of my books to be anything other than alive. I want them to be full of William Blake's virtue: energy. Whether in the so-called nonfiction or the so-called fiction, I am thinking. As long as it has that edge of life to it, I'm satisfied.”

White’s next project is something of a follow up to The Middle Mind. As he describes it, “The present book, whose working title is Something Dangerous: The Spirit of Disobedience, wants to be about theology and the imagination and the politics of refusal. I'd like to ignite a second counterculture. Not modest ambitions, but I don't think anyone should bother to write a book of any kind if they're going to be modest.”