Pacific Agony

by Bruce Benderson

An acidic, satiric novel in the form of a travelogue of the American northwest, complete with annotations by an outraged local.

"I gazed out my window on the sea of dark clouds as my shaking seat jiggled the image into double vision; and I pictured the flat, geometrically divided western landscapes below, wondering why anyone still bothered to travel in this cookie-cutter country. What was the use of visiting identical reproductions of the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584350822
• ISBN13: 9781584350828
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Semiotext(e)
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Sexy and Sinister Travelogue

Bruce Benderson's Pacific Agony is a queer-pomo roman a clef focused on a Blake-ian New Yorker sent out on assignment to write a prejudiced travelogue about the Pacific Northwest. In an opiate haze fueled by vicodin tablets swallowed along with copious amounts of alcohol, the narrator struggles to explore the darker heart of a newly refurbished, DWR & Starbucks-ified locale, even in the midst of it's impossible-to-maintain veneer of upward mobility and fussy "tolerance". He's drawn to folks normally left out of lonely planet guides, the characters that resist easy categorization or live their lives in opposition to creature comforts and hot lattes. The narrator's account is presented as a first-person manuscript, but includes footnotes annotated by a middle-aged female editor, a "native" of the Pacific Northwest, who's personal taste and stake in the material is clearly at odds with Benderson's narrator. This clever structural device provides an accumulated energy throughout the novel - as the story unfolds, the conflict between author and editor gets dramatized in this playing field. The brilliance of the book shines through in passages that clearly articulate the current state and repercussions of American middle-class self-satisfaction and safety. There is a section about the nuclear family's dependence on automobiles that diagrams the A to B line from individual entitlement to international terrorism. Bone-chilling, but a vital point of view that I have yet seen discussed in contemporary fiction.