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.