From the author of THE ROMANIAN, PRETENDING TO SAY NO, and USER: A NOVEL comes a fine new novel entitled PACIFIC AGONY. The book sees one Reginald Fortiphton, an East Coast aesthete and sometime essayist on the verge of vagrancy, accept an assignment writing a travel guide to the Pacific Northwest, a region whose values – a belief in the spiritual qualities of the natural landscape, a bland but deep-seated liberalism, and a complete lack of irony – are precisely those he despises most. The author makes the most of the contrast between the narrator and his surroundings, and the book is stuffed full of amusing rants in the florid BENDERSON style aimed at all aspects of contemporary existence.




















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