Pacific Agony by Bruce Benderson

The metafictional premise of Bruce Benderson’s novel, Pacific Agony, may strike some as a gimmick. Reginald Fortiphton has been commissioned by a Pacific Northwest publisher to fly out from New York and write a book on the region, from the perspective of an outsider. The trip does not go quite as planned, and his editor is left with the mocking tale of a dark journey through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, which is published along with footnotes by a local history buff and Daughter of the Oregon Trail named Narcissa Whitman Applegate. But rather than a cheap trick, Benderson has used the form to satisfying effect.

If the double-entendre in the title isn’t immediately apparent, the first page gives a hint. Fortiphton submits his manuscript prefaced by a letter that asks:

Why do they call it the Rim, a strangely smooth, liminal word for a brutal and terrifying cleavage? Rain is lashing the jagged coastline, and dark, wheeling birds are screeching. They travel in hordes, like locusts, over the few shrubs by the side of the highway, which strain against the merciless wind like shredded sails. Along the shore, the gnashing waves recoil from slippery rocks as if snarling. Who called these heaving seas “Pacific?”’

Fortiphton himself may have called them thus before his trip. He had a plan: he would take advantage of the nice, friendly Seattle yuppies, and in return for a free vacation write a blistering takedown of their bourgeois lifestyle. After all, they live in “New England pretending to be California,” and he finds plenty to criticize.

They didn’t know that I saw their region—which the guidebooks revealed as 87% Caucasian—as little more than one more smug gated community, abysmally unaware of its own identity, disguising its grudging repression as laid-backness and equality, its proper politeness as something mellow.”

Advertising his unreliability as a travel writer so openly to the reader, Fortiphton gives the illusion of reliability. He’s telling it like it is, after all—and his East Coast prejudice against this “squeaky-clean, WASP-derived insipidness” is spot on. But the publisher who has brought the manuscript to light (one Machu Stapler, named after Machu Picchu and father of Noah and Populus) has provided an antidote in Narcissa Whitman Applegate,  Daughter of the Oregon Trail (and mother of Liberty and Evergreen). The historical society enthusiast provides helpful footnotes to Fortiphton’s narrative, explaining just how wrong he is about everything.

To contradict his statements about the bland homogeneity of the region, for example, she quotes a “more balanced perspective” from a different regional guidebook. But even that volume is not enthusiastic enough for her; she must add her own italics and exclamation points to do justice to “one of the most beautiful parts of the nation.”

As he wends his way from Seattle through Portland to Eugene, then up to Astoria, Fortiphton melts into an opiate haze that puts his powers of perception into question as Ms. Applegate revs up her commentary and heaps disdain on his relative lack of knowledge of the region. She pops herself in more and more often as the narrative continues, righting his every wrong and questioning his sanity.

The technique is not groundbreaking—one narrator contradicts another, and the truth of both fall into question. But it ties closely to the very reason Fortiphton is roving the upper-left-hand corner of the country. He’s meant to bring an outsider’s perspective, something lacking in many guidebooks, and instead the reader gets outsider and insider at once, clashing with each other in what they see, what they feel, and how they react. The ideal way to paint the picture of the region most faithfully.

And more importantly, it’s done well. Benderson has no trouble pitting Ms. Applegate’s embarrassing earnestness against the caustic Fortiphton in just the right doses. Fortiphton’s prose, described by Applegate as “demoralized” and “sullen,” is also precise, satisfying, and sardonic. Applegate’s footnotes are superciliously defensive but impossible to take seriously. His every thought is grotesque, lascivious, or both. She is so prim that she treats his interest in environmentalist anarchists as about as horrifying as his penchant for underage boys. They are almost jarringly different—it’s all too easy to complacently identify Fortiphton with the author, but Benderson pulls off both voices with ease.

While Machu Stapler may not have been orchestrating the vast conspiracy a confused Fortiphton suspects, the reader guesses at some more interesting editorial machinations. After all, he’s the one who’s brought this whole effort together, overlaying Fortiphton’s ravings with Ms. Applegate’s commentary and insisting on publishing the whole thing in spite of its small resemblance to his original project. He’s seen the value in Fortiphton’s bizarre journey, which is, despite Applegate’s objections, brimming with feeling for the region.

Because after weeks of contact with “that sinister, vengeful fog,” the manuscript has grown from a biting portrayal of middle-class liberal culture to something more (while not forgetting its roots by any means). The caustic New York writer realizes that “everything I’ve written has been wrong,” bowled over by the hugeness of nature in the Pacific Northwest—“the ballet of the amputated tree trunks…swept to sea by current or storm, smashing against each other in helpless agony.”

Reviewed by Nicole Perrin

Pacific Agony by Bruce Benderson
Semiotext(e), 2009.
Paper. 179 pp. $14.95
ISBN-13: 9781584350828