People who move from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest have to
bear a certain kind of pain as they acclimate to the region’s
peculiarities. You’ve seen the traits caricatured again and again:
Everybody moves slower here, the passive-aggressiveness is stultifying,
and you could choke to death on all the second-guessing. Reginald
Fortiphton is a snide East Coaster who has been delivered to the
Northwest to write a travel guide for a local publisher that feels that
the New York publishing syndicates are intentionally snubbing Seattle
and its environs.
The problem is that Fortiphton, a chain-smoking, bitter gay man who
long ago confused urbanity with cynicism, can’t stand it here; he hates
our health and our forceful condescension. His guide is alternately
miserable and hateful:
Fucking Artists!
It seems the port of Seattle had deemed it moral to dot this site of
past slaughter with generously spacious lofts for this new flock of
doomed squatters—producers, no doubt, of the usual flaccid
conceptualist gestures, political tinkerers and bricoleurs at
best.
In fact, his publishers hate Fortiphton’s guide so much that they
commission a local academic—Narcissa Whitman Applegate “of the
Willamette-Columbia Historical Legion and the Daughters of the Oregon
Trail Historical Committee” to provide chirpy, go-team footnotes to the
text, like this passage describing a fundraiser in Redmond, which
disputes Fortiphton’s claims that the Northwest is an alienating
place:
Hilarious one-legged races, playful parodies of
some of our local officials, not to mention a highly effective
monologue by a young actress… created a personal, candid atmosphere
at which every single person had fun. No one’s being kept
out.
As the tour continues, Fortiphton and Applegate snipe at each other
between text and annotation—allegations of molestation start to
fly—and the idea of the Northwest continues to warp and twist
into something between an emerald paradise and a twisted hell. By the
end of his journey, Fortiphton comes perilously close to losing his
mind. Benderson displays great skill at writing both the old erudite
crank and the glossy cheerleader, and the end result is a novel that is
more about interior terrain than the land outside our window. The book
reads more like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Passive-Aggressiveness, with
commentary by some anonymous, brain-dead copywriter for Seattle
Metropolitan magazine. It’s a delicious combination. 