Every Man Must Build a Home is a traditional American road novel, featuring a young male traversing American geography in search of things better pursued internally.   Only here the protagonist's direction is backwards from the usual current:  he starts in the West and heads East.  About halfway through the book, the trip loses shape, flits all over the map, and ends up in on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.  By which time an alternative narrative has emerged, set in a distant century, involving an art form practiced by bodiless beings in deep space, projecting arrangements of images onto the void, at a huge expense of energy which is depleting what is left of the physical universe.