Panopticon by David Bajo

In his second novel, Panopticon, David Bajo draws from his wealth of Southern California life experience to craft a compelling story of borderlands and surveillance. The story begins with Aaron Klinsman’s visit to an empty hotel room on assignment as a reporter for the soon-to-fold Review. As he explores the room and takes pictures, he notices a number of baffling details, including pieces of electrician’s tape stuck in various places, and a detailed imprint of a woman’s body left in the folds of the bedcover. Just as Klinsman’s brief exploration of the motel room at the beginning of this novel slowly offers obscure hints to a story that captures his curiosity, Bajo’s novel gradually and effortlessly immerses the reader in a mysterious Southern California borderland in which everything, and everyone, is subject to being monitored.

As the novel moves forward, Bajo simultaneously imagines a fascinating, hauntingly realistic world of omnipresent video surveillance and develops Klinsman’s nuanced personality and complicated relationships, past and present. Klinsman and his colleagues move through the novel’s landscape on assignment, encountering some of the tensions of language, culture, and ethnicity that are inevitable in the borderland community. Bajo highlights a very personal element of this tension for Klinsman through some of his childhood experiences, including a bite from a Mexican snake and the subsequent relationship with a girl of Mexican descent, both of which leave indelible marks on Klinsman’s personality.

While in many respects the tensions that exist in the world of Bajo’s borderland novel are functions of ethnic and cultural gaps, as evidenced by the mozos or salamandros who seem always to be monitoring the video feeds, Bajo explores another element of voyeurism through Klinsman’s relationship with Rita. With the closing of their paper and their impending mutual departure from the city, their relationship is shaken up by the fact that they have just a week left to act on any attraction or chemistry they’ve experienced thus far as colleagues. Bajo does a nice job of complementing the highly charged sexual component of this relationship with an emotional depth and complexity, enhanced by the role of surveillance in their interactions. In one scene early in the novel, Oscar warns Klinsman that he’s being watched:

Oscar measured him steadily, as though he were telling Klinsman about himself, but he spoke of her. “You think right now she’s shooting that stuff up in the rafters. But she’s getting us, too. That little cheap-looking digital on her hip is on, aimed right at us. Her big fancy camera is making all that noise, all those fake clicking sounds. But that quiet little thing on her hip, with the indicator light punched out, is getting us.”

Klinsman spotted the little grey rectangle at Rita’s hip.

“She already has you looking at her,” said Oscar. “You looking at her in that way. That way you just were. She’ll take those captures, still them, sharpen them, move in. All the way into your eyes maybe. And know exactly how you’re feeling. Maybe better than you know.”

Rita isn’t the only one in the relationship who enjoys indulging in voyeuristic tendencies, or the only suggestion of knowing someone more intimately than they know themselves through surveillance. Later in the story, when Klinsman’s insomnia brings him to his desk in the newsroom while Rita sleeps, his boss Gina ends a video call with him by patching him through to a video monitor in Rita’s bedroom. Klinsman finds himself uncomfortable watching Rita sleep, afraid that he’ll see her wake:

To see her wake, that was what Klinsman feared. We’re not meant to see that most intimate moment of a person’s day. When she would gather, in a few seconds, the span of her life, the consequences of a night, the unveiled and jagged surface. When she would gasp into consciousness and he would see her thoughts flash undistilled across her waking expression. He would know how she felt about her life.

It is in the exchange between Klinsman and Gina that precedes this moment of surveillance that Bajo exposes the question that seems to propel this novel. In their discussion about the ability to navigate available live video feeds and monitor people, Klinsman asks Gina who is “good enough . . . to get anyone? Everyone?” Gina explains to Klinsman that she hopes he, Rita, and Oscar, “together in the accident of desire,” can find that out.

Bajo has done a fine job with Panopticon, putting unique and memorable characters into an intriguing and somewhat disturbing world. The tensions and themes explored in Panopticon are timely and relevant, and Bajo’s writing makes for an immensely satisfying reading experience.

Reviewed by Chris Corning

Panopticon by David Bajo
Unbridled Books, 2010
Cloth, 370 pp, $25.95
ISBN-13: 9781609530020