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The Bend of the World
In the most audacious literary debut to come out of the Steel City since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, we meet Peter Morrison, twenty-nine and comfortably adrift in a state of not-quite-adulthood, less concerned about the general direction of his life than with his suspicion that all his closest relationships are the products of inertia. He and his girlfriend float along in the same general direction, while his parents are acting funny, though his rich, hypochondriac grandmother is still good for admission to the better parties. He spends his days clocking into Global Solutions (a firm whose purpose remains unnervingly ambiguous) and his weekends listening to the half-imagined rants of his childhood best friend, Johnny. An addict and conspiracy theorist, Johnny believes Pittsburgh is a "nexus of intense magical convergence" and is playing host to a cabal of dubious politicians, evil corporate schemes, ancient occult rites, and otherwise inexplicable phenomena, such as the fact that people really do keep seeing UFOs hovering over the city.
Against this strange background, Peter meets Mark and Helen, a slightly older couple, new to town, whose wealth and glamour never fully conceal the suggestion of something sinister, and with whom he becomes quickly infatuated. Mark is a corporate lawyer in the process of negotiating a buyout of Global Solutions, and initiates Peter into the real, mundane (maybe) conspiracies of corporations and careers, while Helen — a beautiful and once prominent artist — is both the echo and the promise of the sort of woman Peter always imagined, or was always told he ought to find for himself.
As Peter climbs the corporate ladder, Johnny is pulled into the orbit of a mysterious local author, Winston Pringle, whose lunatic book of conspiracies seems to be coming true. As Johnny falls farther down the rabbit hole, the surreal begins to seep into the mundane, and the settled rhythm of Peter's routine is disrupted by a series of close encounters of third, fourth, and fifth kinds. By the time Peter sets out to save his friend from Pringle's evil machinations (and pharmacological interventions), his familiar life threatens to transform into that most terrifying possibility: a surprise.
In The Bend of the World Philip K. Dick meets Michael Chabon, and Jacob Bacharach creates an appropriately hilarious, bizarre, and keenly observed portrait of life on the edge of thirty in the adolescent years of twenty-first-century America.
Against this strange background, Peter meets Mark and Helen, a slightly older couple, new to town, whose wealth and glamour never fully conceal the suggestion of something sinister, and with whom he becomes quickly infatuated. Mark is a corporate lawyer in the process of negotiating a buyout of Global Solutions, and initiates Peter into the real, mundane (maybe) conspiracies of corporations and careers, while Helen — a beautiful and once prominent artist — is both the echo and the promise of the sort of woman Peter always imagined, or was always told he ought to find for himself.
As Peter climbs the corporate ladder, Johnny is pulled into the orbit of a mysterious local author, Winston Pringle, whose lunatic book of conspiracies seems to be coming true. As Johnny falls farther down the rabbit hole, the surreal begins to seep into the mundane, and the settled rhythm of Peter's routine is disrupted by a series of close encounters of third, fourth, and fifth kinds. By the time Peter sets out to save his friend from Pringle's evil machinations (and pharmacological interventions), his familiar life threatens to transform into that most terrifying possibility: a surprise.
In The Bend of the World Philip K. Dick meets Michael Chabon, and Jacob Bacharach creates an appropriately hilarious, bizarre, and keenly observed portrait of life on the edge of thirty in the adolescent years of twenty-first-century America.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published April 14, 2014
25 people are currently reading
722 people want to read
About the author
Jacob Bacharach
3 books49 followersI’m a writer in Pittsburgh. My forthcoming second novel, The Doorposts of your House and on Your Gates, arrives in March, 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 80 reviews
February 9, 2017
Finding out that someone you know primarily on Twitter, let alone on the sub-basement of quasi-Marxist wise-asses known as “Weird Left Twitter”, has not only written and published a novel, but that it’s a pretty celebrated novel at that, is one of those experiences that no amount of training as a professional critic can really equip you for. Most cultural commentators of my generation developed their craft during the pre-internet period of the late 20th century, and had to hone our sensibilities without having to worry about whether or not a bad review would end up getting us dragged or turned into a meme.
Luckily for me, the person who wrote the book is Jacob Bacharach, who is smart, perceptive, and funny (and tends to save his ire for targets a lot more prominent than I am, albeit just as soft), and the book is The Bend of the World, which is quite good indeed. The fact that my mind reflexively insisted on thinking of its author as Jake Backpack (his Twitter handle) didn’t get in the way of what is an excellent debut in a very solid modern literary tradition: the paranoid picaresque, with its roots as far back as the founding of the Republic but reaching its apotheosis in the works of Thomas Pynchon, of America as a place so rich and vast that it has become haunted by its own strangeness, where its own abandoned children trip aimlessly through its landscape coming to terms with the ghosts of its own history.
Had Michael Chabon not used the name for his own first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh might be a good title for Bacharach’s book (a superior work in many ways). It is the decaying steel town, reinventing itself to an alienated generation in a new service economy, that is home to Global Solutions – one of those omnipresent tech companies that provides so many smart but directionless young people with more money than they can use for doing something they don’t really know how to explain in service to a goal none of them are aware of – and to its employee, Peter Morrison. From a good family, but without any of the concomitant qualities or obligations, he and his friends drift through life, with their only drive coming from the possibly unhinged and definitely drugged up Johnny, a conspiracy theorist who believes just about every open-ended curiousity he comes across is part of a greater pattern of interconnectedness just below the surface of life in this otherwise typical postmodern metropolis.
Of course, if you’ve followed my reviews for any length of time and why should you have, you know this is meat for someone like me. The idea that there is something very odd lurking behind the façade of dead-end America is powerfully appealing to people of a particular mindset, and in Peter and Johnny, Bacharach has given us prime examples of two of that very mindset. For Peter, money and a good reputation is ultimately empty, and the notion that there’s something far more meaningful hiding in the dark corners waiting to be revealed is awfully tempting; for Johnny, in the exact opposite circumstance, it’s easy to believe that sinister machinations of forces beyond our control are responsible for your failures, for your powerlessness, for your inability to safely navigate the world. But The Bend of the World doesn’t stop with just painting us a sharp, satirical picture of urban alienation; he goes a step farther and asks, well, what if all those conspiracy theories are right, after all? Would it be better or worse?
Were they just blundering around on their own – as they seem to be early in the novel – Peter and Johnny might undertake a meandering postmodernist road novel, something that’s been done plenty of times and usually to enervating effect. Lucky for us that Bacharach doesn’t count on them to do all the heavy lifting themselves: among his well-limned supporting characters are matching sets of mentors ready to initiate the two into their respective corners of the conspiracy. Peter hooks up with Mark and Helen, a wealthy and successful couple with an alluringly dark past, while Johnny falls under the sway of the wonderfully named Winston Pringle, a Fortean figure who has the unusual talent of making predictions that actually come true. They’re further sucked into the creepy but appealing world-views of these people, while their lives get more and more bizarre, both individually and in relationship to one another.
Bacharach plays this all with a narrative skill that’s quite surprising for a relatively young and untested author. He keeps a lot of parts moving, and even where the plot isn’t watertight, he carries it along with a louche style, amusing observations about our spectacle society, and a terrifically laid-back and effortless sense of humor much more cutting and honest than what we’re accustomed to seeing from literary novels that make an attempt at humor. Bacharach is genuinely funny and alarmingly serious at the same time, and his work never seems forced, with the humor flowing seamlessly into the narrative. There are always lots of absurd things happening, but The Bend of the World is not an absurdist narrative, and one of its great strengths is that it manages to keep you guessing about what is and isn’t real while simultaneously making you question whether or not that actually matters.
A new novel, The Doorposts of Your House and On Your Gates, is due to be released this spring, and it will be fascinating to see what Bacharach does both with a more sprawling narrative and with a vastly different socio-political landscape than he had when The Bend of the World was released three short years and a lifetime ago. But regardless, his first book, while still bearing some of the halting hallmarks of a writer new to long-form fiction including a handful of rough patches and a paucity of characterization regarding some of the minor characters, is still a remarkable accomplishment for a writer of his age – though certainly not for one of his talent. One to watch, folks.
Luckily for me, the person who wrote the book is Jacob Bacharach, who is smart, perceptive, and funny (and tends to save his ire for targets a lot more prominent than I am, albeit just as soft), and the book is The Bend of the World, which is quite good indeed. The fact that my mind reflexively insisted on thinking of its author as Jake Backpack (his Twitter handle) didn’t get in the way of what is an excellent debut in a very solid modern literary tradition: the paranoid picaresque, with its roots as far back as the founding of the Republic but reaching its apotheosis in the works of Thomas Pynchon, of America as a place so rich and vast that it has become haunted by its own strangeness, where its own abandoned children trip aimlessly through its landscape coming to terms with the ghosts of its own history.
Had Michael Chabon not used the name for his own first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh might be a good title for Bacharach’s book (a superior work in many ways). It is the decaying steel town, reinventing itself to an alienated generation in a new service economy, that is home to Global Solutions – one of those omnipresent tech companies that provides so many smart but directionless young people with more money than they can use for doing something they don’t really know how to explain in service to a goal none of them are aware of – and to its employee, Peter Morrison. From a good family, but without any of the concomitant qualities or obligations, he and his friends drift through life, with their only drive coming from the possibly unhinged and definitely drugged up Johnny, a conspiracy theorist who believes just about every open-ended curiousity he comes across is part of a greater pattern of interconnectedness just below the surface of life in this otherwise typical postmodern metropolis.
Of course, if you’ve followed my reviews for any length of time and why should you have, you know this is meat for someone like me. The idea that there is something very odd lurking behind the façade of dead-end America is powerfully appealing to people of a particular mindset, and in Peter and Johnny, Bacharach has given us prime examples of two of that very mindset. For Peter, money and a good reputation is ultimately empty, and the notion that there’s something far more meaningful hiding in the dark corners waiting to be revealed is awfully tempting; for Johnny, in the exact opposite circumstance, it’s easy to believe that sinister machinations of forces beyond our control are responsible for your failures, for your powerlessness, for your inability to safely navigate the world. But The Bend of the World doesn’t stop with just painting us a sharp, satirical picture of urban alienation; he goes a step farther and asks, well, what if all those conspiracy theories are right, after all? Would it be better or worse?
Were they just blundering around on their own – as they seem to be early in the novel – Peter and Johnny might undertake a meandering postmodernist road novel, something that’s been done plenty of times and usually to enervating effect. Lucky for us that Bacharach doesn’t count on them to do all the heavy lifting themselves: among his well-limned supporting characters are matching sets of mentors ready to initiate the two into their respective corners of the conspiracy. Peter hooks up with Mark and Helen, a wealthy and successful couple with an alluringly dark past, while Johnny falls under the sway of the wonderfully named Winston Pringle, a Fortean figure who has the unusual talent of making predictions that actually come true. They’re further sucked into the creepy but appealing world-views of these people, while their lives get more and more bizarre, both individually and in relationship to one another.
Bacharach plays this all with a narrative skill that’s quite surprising for a relatively young and untested author. He keeps a lot of parts moving, and even where the plot isn’t watertight, he carries it along with a louche style, amusing observations about our spectacle society, and a terrifically laid-back and effortless sense of humor much more cutting and honest than what we’re accustomed to seeing from literary novels that make an attempt at humor. Bacharach is genuinely funny and alarmingly serious at the same time, and his work never seems forced, with the humor flowing seamlessly into the narrative. There are always lots of absurd things happening, but The Bend of the World is not an absurdist narrative, and one of its great strengths is that it manages to keep you guessing about what is and isn’t real while simultaneously making you question whether or not that actually matters.
A new novel, The Doorposts of Your House and On Your Gates, is due to be released this spring, and it will be fascinating to see what Bacharach does both with a more sprawling narrative and with a vastly different socio-political landscape than he had when The Bend of the World was released three short years and a lifetime ago. But regardless, his first book, while still bearing some of the halting hallmarks of a writer new to long-form fiction including a handful of rough patches and a paucity of characterization regarding some of the minor characters, is still a remarkable accomplishment for a writer of his age – though certainly not for one of his talent. One to watch, folks.
October 29, 2015
I read this book because I recently moved to Pittsburgh and I like to read a place's authors to get a sense of that place.
That being said, I did not like this book. It kind of reminds me of "John Dies at the End" in that it's mostly ridiculous, often confusing but with sometimes amusing dialogue.
One thing that I HATED was the fact tha the author refused to use quotations around his dialogue and often just smashed whole conversations into a single paragraph so that you had no idea who was talking. He also filled far too many pages with pseudo-scientific language that was more frustrating than anything. And, there's not resolution. The end of the book is ridiculous and makes you feel like you just wasted your time.
It's almost as if the author wrote this while on a drug-fueled bender; you can see how it'd make sense if you were under the influence, but as I was sober while reading it, I didn't like it.
So, to sum up, two stars because you can tell he's a good writer and it did make me laugh at times and because it's certainly not the worst book I've ever read. But, I can't recommend it.
That being said, I did not like this book. It kind of reminds me of "John Dies at the End" in that it's mostly ridiculous, often confusing but with sometimes amusing dialogue.
One thing that I HATED was the fact tha the author refused to use quotations around his dialogue and often just smashed whole conversations into a single paragraph so that you had no idea who was talking. He also filled far too many pages with pseudo-scientific language that was more frustrating than anything. And, there's not resolution. The end of the book is ridiculous and makes you feel like you just wasted your time.
It's almost as if the author wrote this while on a drug-fueled bender; you can see how it'd make sense if you were under the influence, but as I was sober while reading it, I didn't like it.
So, to sum up, two stars because you can tell he's a good writer and it did make me laugh at times and because it's certainly not the worst book I've ever read. But, I can't recommend it.
December 31, 2015
There is undoubtedly a more dramatic way to announce this, but The Bend of the World wins my award for Favorite Read of 2015, and by unanimous decision at that (no small task, despite the restricted voting committee). Compared to years past, 2015 was not an especially book-heavy year for me, but please do not allow the limited pool of competition to diminish the accomplishment. This is no participation trophy and 5 stars is still damn near 6. Congratulations, Jacob Bacharach.
The Bend of the World is a difficult novel to describe, but I guess the best way I can come up with is that it's like Twentysomething, mixed with Catch 22 and a dash of Twin Peaks* weirdness. The book is hilarious and readable, and the oft-drug-fueled narrative really brings the city of Pittsburgh to life. I suppose at its core the story is a satire about the absurdity of youth in our society or something like that, but quite simply I just found it a hell of a lot of fun to read.
*Note: I'm embarrassingly proud of that cross-decade, cross-medium comparison. Though I should note that I haven't read those books for so long it could be WAY off base. I do not apologize.
In addition to being my favorite book of 2015, I read this during one of my favorite moments of 2015. After two weeks of a very demanding training program in Paris for work, Tiffany met me in France and we spent a week vacationing in the Bordeaux region. Our timing could not have been better, as the first days of spring met us in Medoc. Sun shining, we spent one afternoon on the patio of the old Chateau drinking wine and overlooking the well manicured grounds in first bloom. We napped, periodically strolled the grounds and I read Bend of the World. The voting committee is not above bribery.
The Bend of the World is a difficult novel to describe, but I guess the best way I can come up with is that it's like Twentysomething, mixed with Catch 22 and a dash of Twin Peaks* weirdness. The book is hilarious and readable, and the oft-drug-fueled narrative really brings the city of Pittsburgh to life. I suppose at its core the story is a satire about the absurdity of youth in our society or something like that, but quite simply I just found it a hell of a lot of fun to read.
*Note: I'm embarrassingly proud of that cross-decade, cross-medium comparison. Though I should note that I haven't read those books for so long it could be WAY off base. I do not apologize.
In addition to being my favorite book of 2015, I read this during one of my favorite moments of 2015. After two weeks of a very demanding training program in Paris for work, Tiffany met me in France and we spent a week vacationing in the Bordeaux region. Our timing could not have been better, as the first days of spring met us in Medoc. Sun shining, we spent one afternoon on the patio of the old Chateau drinking wine and overlooking the well manicured grounds in first bloom. We napped, periodically strolled the grounds and I read Bend of the World. The voting committee is not above bribery.
November 5, 2024
Very patience-testing. I wanted to throw this book across the room. There were moments where I feel like things were just unclear, and I was very frustrated. Not like intentionally ambiguous, just stupid things like me not being able to tell who was speaking or which person they were referring to. Then it redeemed itself a tiny bit at the end by turning into The Great Gatsby.
March 3, 2018
It's a testament to Jacob Bacharach's talent that I enjoyed The Bend of the World despite the fact that there are
no quotation marks in it at all.
I hate that shit, and I was very upset when I found myself gradually getting used to it and even accepting it as part of Bacharach's style. He clearly wants the words to flow at a swift, steady pace. His sentences charge through multiple ideas at once, and his characters move quickly through their moods, through their conversations, and through the streets of Pittsburgh. If you don't like the way Bacharach writes, that's fine, but you can't deny the consistency of his technique.
You also can't deny that he's really funny. I did some extremely diligent research and determined that I haven't laughed this hard while reading a book in over a year and a half. The scene near the climax of the novel where Peter and Johnny walk into the woods is worth the price of admission alone. Bacharach strikes a nice balance between being funny in a witty writer sort of way and being funny in a slapstick Curly Howard kind of way, so there's something for everyone.
However, the aforementioned Peter and Johnny are part of a wildly unremarkable cast of characters. Peter is built in the mold of a Kurt Vonnegut protagonist. He shrugs his shoulders a lot and has sex with pretty women while looking at the world in an, "I'm not judging you for caring about stuff, but I'm almost certainly smarter than you because I don't care about stuff" sort of way. Johnny, like everyone else in the book, puts in a one-note performance.
I didn't mind that too much, though. I've read enough books with interesting characters that are trampled to death under the pen of authors who can't write. I prefer boring characters buoyed by someone with literary talent.
The Bend of the World wins the bronze medal in the "Books by Authors I Follow on Twitter" contest, which I'm sure means a great deal to Bacharach.
You also can't deny that he's really funny. I did some extremely diligent research and determined that I haven't laughed this hard while reading a book in over a year and a half. The scene near the climax of the novel where Peter and Johnny walk into the woods is worth the price of admission alone. Bacharach strikes a nice balance between being funny in a witty writer sort of way and being funny in a slapstick Curly Howard kind of way, so there's something for everyone.
However, the aforementioned Peter and Johnny are part of a wildly unremarkable cast of characters. Peter is built in the mold of a Kurt Vonnegut protagonist. He shrugs his shoulders a lot and has sex with pretty women while looking at the world in an, "I'm not judging you for caring about stuff, but I'm almost certainly smarter than you because I don't care about stuff" sort of way. Johnny, like everyone else in the book, puts in a one-note performance.
I didn't mind that too much, though. I've read enough books with interesting characters that are trampled to death under the pen of authors who can't write. I prefer boring characters buoyed by someone with literary talent.
The Bend of the World wins the bronze medal in the "Books by Authors I Follow on Twitter" contest, which I'm sure means a great deal to Bacharach.
December 17, 2015
Bacharach really can write. That's the upside. But despite that gift, this just is not a good read. The dialogue is often sparkling, but then you get long passages of really dull stuff about aliens, and a lot of internal monologues which go nowhere.
Part of the problem is the characters are flat. Peter Morrison, the protagonist, has no goals, no strong feelings for people, and a job in which he does nothing. His best buddy, Johnny Robertson, is certainly odd, but not (for the most part) in an endearing way. The other people in the story have no discernible personality.
I fear that there is a great deal of accuracy in the description of life for the generation this book focuses on. There is a lot of drug use, a fair amount of casual sex, and no one who has any purpose in how they spend their days. There is no sense of people going anywhere; they are like a car stuck in neutral.
And that gets me to the problems with the plot. Not very much happens. People talk a lot, do the above mentioned recreational things, play racquetball, eat and certainly drink. There is larger plot as well -- one involves extraterrestrials and beings from some other dimension (as far as I can tell; I tended to skim through those portions of the book), another is a satire on the soullessness of corporate American, and perhaps a bit of a satire on the art world as well. This is probably too much to try in one novel, and none of it is done well.
The bottom line is the story did not engage me and there are no people in this book I like (or hate, for that matter). I hope life is not as empty for thirty-ish folks as this story suggests. There is an aura of sadness throughout this, or maybe an emptiness which makes me sad. That does not make for a fun read.
Part of the problem is the characters are flat. Peter Morrison, the protagonist, has no goals, no strong feelings for people, and a job in which he does nothing. His best buddy, Johnny Robertson, is certainly odd, but not (for the most part) in an endearing way. The other people in the story have no discernible personality.
I fear that there is a great deal of accuracy in the description of life for the generation this book focuses on. There is a lot of drug use, a fair amount of casual sex, and no one who has any purpose in how they spend their days. There is no sense of people going anywhere; they are like a car stuck in neutral.
And that gets me to the problems with the plot. Not very much happens. People talk a lot, do the above mentioned recreational things, play racquetball, eat and certainly drink. There is larger plot as well -- one involves extraterrestrials and beings from some other dimension (as far as I can tell; I tended to skim through those portions of the book), another is a satire on the soullessness of corporate American, and perhaps a bit of a satire on the art world as well. This is probably too much to try in one novel, and none of it is done well.
The bottom line is the story did not engage me and there are no people in this book I like (or hate, for that matter). I hope life is not as empty for thirty-ish folks as this story suggests. There is an aura of sadness throughout this, or maybe an emptiness which makes me sad. That does not make for a fun read.
November 14, 2014
I recently attended a concert at the Benedum and had the great inconvenience of being told that my backpack-style purse was not welcome in the theater and that there was no place the staff would let me store my purse (I left it behind a garbage can on a dirty floor in the outer lobby). After having stuffed every item of value into my jacket pockets, of course something went missing and I ended up searching the theater until an hour after the show ended for my cell phone. (It ended up going home in some woman's suitcase to Rochester, New York. She was kind enough to send it back, but in the meantime I had to buy a new phone.) Fortunately Bacharach's book is much better than his %#5&*!@ purse policy.
This book reminded me of the movies Office Space and Pineapple Express. It's laugh-out-loud funny and filled with Pittsburgh news references and locales. The main characters are slackers and druggies (not in a glorifying way), but they are smart and have great vocabularies. The ending's a bit of a let-down (the book suddenly gets more sad than funny) and the lack of quotation marks made for slow reading as I tried to figure out who was saying what and where the narration was. But overall this is one of the most entertaining books I've ever read.
This book reminded me of the movies Office Space and Pineapple Express. It's laugh-out-loud funny and filled with Pittsburgh news references and locales. The main characters are slackers and druggies (not in a glorifying way), but they are smart and have great vocabularies. The ending's a bit of a let-down (the book suddenly gets more sad than funny) and the lack of quotation marks made for slow reading as I tried to figure out who was saying what and where the narration was. But overall this is one of the most entertaining books I've ever read.
February 18, 2015
Truth telling time. I'm not sure I would have finished this if it hadn't been set in Pittsburgh. Bacharach is a good writer with a great ear for dialogue and a finely honed sense of the absurd, but all that was put in the service of a plot that combined the occult with the kind of dystopian view of office life that has been done much better by Joshua Ferris and Douglas Copeland.
Without the local color, I'm not sure I would have lasted through the description of an office where no one did anything real or parties with lots of drugs but no happiness or a bizarre conspiracy featuring time travel and flying saucers and Bigfoot.
I hope Bacharach can find better themes in the future for his admirable writing skills.
Without the local color, I'm not sure I would have lasted through the description of an office where no one did anything real or parties with lots of drugs but no happiness or a bizarre conspiracy featuring time travel and flying saucers and Bigfoot.
I hope Bacharach can find better themes in the future for his admirable writing skills.
November 23, 2021
I really enjoyed the fast paced dialogue of this super fun satirical novel. You really can’t go wrong with anything this quick. I love stories that really skirt on the edge of reality and this is exactly what I got. I also love novels that paint such an expert picture of where and what I’m reading. In this case it was Pittsburgh and the birds eye view I was given was awesome. I also love all of the cloaks of secrecy, secret organization, and private clubs. But at the end of the day this is a UFO novel, and that section was explored expertly. I really loved the humor but above all the pace of the book is what kept me reading. I also really suggest you pick this one up for a road trip, that’s my circumstance. Sometimes books like these make the ride go really quick!
September 14, 2017
When the first sentence of a book is barely comprehensible, you know you are in for a bumpy ride. I was excited to read this based on reviews and the general description. I am not sure of the lack of quotations and other odd stylistic choices were aesthetic choices or just poor writing. Either way I just couldn't finish this book.
November 10, 2018
I really wanted to like this because it was set in Pittsburgh, where I lived for seven years. It was neat to reminisce about streets and bridges, but ultimately I just don’t care that much about men who snort coke and have ambivalent sex.
I don’t usually fail to finish reading a book, but this time I think I’ll read something I’m more interested in.
I don’t usually fail to finish reading a book, but this time I think I’ll read something I’m more interested in.
July 27, 2022
This was a pretty entertaining, agreeable, somewhat forgettable humor novel. Jacob Bacharach is a weird twitter habitue and entertaining guest on lefty podcasts, or was back when I listened to those more. He’s one of those small/mid-size city dudes who is all in on his small/mid-size city, in his case, Pittsburg. The main character – I’m behind on reviews and forget his name, it doesn’t really matter – is a young corporate drone from a rich family who’s wasting his life on noncommittal relationships, jobs, and priorities in general.
He then has a weird year! He meets a disturbingly fascinating couple, a bold young man and a tragic alcoholic sexy artist lady, at a party, the same night he sees some UFOs! The main character has been on the fringe of conspiracy stuff for most of life due to his best friend, Johnny (yes, I did sometimes imagine him as Johnny from “The Room,” but the author reads this in his own, non-Wiseauesque voice so it didn’t happen too often). Johnny is a gay, drug-addicted conspiracy theorist, which, if I remember Bacharach’s podcast appearances, is not too dissimilar to Bacharach himself as a teenager/young man. Johnny believes Pittsburg is the center of a massive conspiracy involving Nazis, time-tunnels, summoning alternate dimensons, and bigfoots.
The main character doesn’t really believe in all this stuff and alternately humors Johnny and tries to save Johnny from himself, his drug problems and tendency to annoy powerful Pittsburgers. Meanwhile, the dude from the compelling couple gets a job at the main character’s pointless company and offers to make the main character a soulless corporate shark like himself. Is this company, and the weird guy in particular, part of a big conspiracy? Maybe THE big conspiracy? It’s hard to say. The main character interacts with the art world, his family, his hippy artsy girlfriend and more serious tragic drunk artist second love interest.
Bacharach evokes an agreeable atmosphere of confusion as to what, exactly, the big Nazi/time-traveller/Pittsburg/bigfoot conspiracy is, intermingling it with a lot of shit both weird and mundane, but this does have the effect (especially when combined with my review backlog) of making me forget whether the conspiracy WAS real or not, and what exactly it was. At some point, the main character and the drunk sexy artist have to strike out into Appalachian Pennsylvania to save Johnny from the main theorist of the big conspiracy, who turns out to have weird designs of his own. There’s showdowns at a big weird drug/orgone party in the woods, complete with possibly-drug-induced visions of beneficient Bigfoots. In the end, some people die, and the main character decides to ditch corporate whatever and become… a landlord?! Well… this might have been before Bacharach made his turn all the way left, he was right-libertarian leaning as a young drug-addled semi-ironic conspiracy theorist… but that’s a minor point. I was worried it was going to take the path of “guy meets a weird alpha man’s man who leads him to uncomfortable discoveries,” ala “Fight Club,” “The Red Pill,” and I feel a fair number of zeitgeisty works from the last thirty years or so. That doesn’t happen! Stuff does happen, but usually without much sense of stakes. That’s not the worst thing in the world. This was pretty fun, somewhat forgettable- some of the things that might have made it less forgettable might have made it less fun, if you get what I mean. ****
He then has a weird year! He meets a disturbingly fascinating couple, a bold young man and a tragic alcoholic sexy artist lady, at a party, the same night he sees some UFOs! The main character has been on the fringe of conspiracy stuff for most of life due to his best friend, Johnny (yes, I did sometimes imagine him as Johnny from “The Room,” but the author reads this in his own, non-Wiseauesque voice so it didn’t happen too often). Johnny is a gay, drug-addicted conspiracy theorist, which, if I remember Bacharach’s podcast appearances, is not too dissimilar to Bacharach himself as a teenager/young man. Johnny believes Pittsburg is the center of a massive conspiracy involving Nazis, time-tunnels, summoning alternate dimensons, and bigfoots.
The main character doesn’t really believe in all this stuff and alternately humors Johnny and tries to save Johnny from himself, his drug problems and tendency to annoy powerful Pittsburgers. Meanwhile, the dude from the compelling couple gets a job at the main character’s pointless company and offers to make the main character a soulless corporate shark like himself. Is this company, and the weird guy in particular, part of a big conspiracy? Maybe THE big conspiracy? It’s hard to say. The main character interacts with the art world, his family, his hippy artsy girlfriend and more serious tragic drunk artist second love interest.
Bacharach evokes an agreeable atmosphere of confusion as to what, exactly, the big Nazi/time-traveller/Pittsburg/bigfoot conspiracy is, intermingling it with a lot of shit both weird and mundane, but this does have the effect (especially when combined with my review backlog) of making me forget whether the conspiracy WAS real or not, and what exactly it was. At some point, the main character and the drunk sexy artist have to strike out into Appalachian Pennsylvania to save Johnny from the main theorist of the big conspiracy, who turns out to have weird designs of his own. There’s showdowns at a big weird drug/orgone party in the woods, complete with possibly-drug-induced visions of beneficient Bigfoots. In the end, some people die, and the main character decides to ditch corporate whatever and become… a landlord?! Well… this might have been before Bacharach made his turn all the way left, he was right-libertarian leaning as a young drug-addled semi-ironic conspiracy theorist… but that’s a minor point. I was worried it was going to take the path of “guy meets a weird alpha man’s man who leads him to uncomfortable discoveries,” ala “Fight Club,” “The Red Pill,” and I feel a fair number of zeitgeisty works from the last thirty years or so. That doesn’t happen! Stuff does happen, but usually without much sense of stakes. That’s not the worst thing in the world. This was pretty fun, somewhat forgettable- some of the things that might have made it less forgettable might have made it less fun, if you get what I mean. ****
November 8, 2018
Nothing going on here, folks – please move along. Okay, sometimes there ARE some “liquid and silver” (p258) UFOs humming above the city, but you have to take into account that the witnesses in Jacob Bacharach’s deliberately weird novel are suggestible occult hobbyists and usually drunk, stoned, or both at once. Pittsburgh, of all places, is treated in THE BEND OF THE WORLD as “a nexus of intense magical convergence”…“wherein vast telluric currents and pranic energies roil just beyond the liminal boundaries between the phenomenal and numinous branes of existence” (p5). Ready for a Chamber of Commerce brochure, that blurb is! The coterie of hipsters drifting around the City of Bridges in this novel are feckless, cynical and, finally, culpable. “No one sees the end of the world” (p116), sneers hip corporate shark Mark Danner, whose job is described as “tossing grenades at balance sheets” (p224). Mark also can be counted on to deliver quasi-profound witticisms like: “The truth is an artifact of the present. It’s time that changes” (p175). Jacob Bacharach’s limp protagonist, Peter-never-“Pete”-Morrison, is drawn from inertia into the high-flying orbit of Mark and his even hipper painter girlfriend, Helen. His ultimate developmental challenge is to escape being a “reptiloid yuppie monster” (p256), but it is unclear in THE BEND OF THE WORLD whether Peter will grow out of his stunted, directionless condition or AGE out of it.
May 16, 2018
I chose to read Bacharach's book, because it was highlighted on a library summer reading list last year given that I live in Pittsburgh, this story is set there, and I wished to support a local author. However, beyond clever dialogue, this book was disappointing.
I will summarize it like this, have you ever had the experience that a book starts strong, loses its Way midway through, but has strong enough dialogue and character development to pull you toward the possibility that something will happen that is climactic only to have it not happen? If you would like to replicate that experience, read this book.
I will summarize it like this, have you ever had the experience that a book starts strong, loses its Way midway through, but has strong enough dialogue and character development to pull you toward the possibility that something will happen that is climactic only to have it not happen? If you would like to replicate that experience, read this book.
June 26, 2017
This book was a lot of fun. If you liked Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, you might enjoy this book. Both make fun of conspiracy theorists while also just hinting at the possibility that some of the craziness just might be true. Eco's book is much more coherent and perhaps more skillfully written, but Bachrach's book was hillarious and quicker to read. The experience of reading this book was sort of like ingesting some major psychedelic drug without actually endangering one's mental or physical health.
July 15, 2018
Overall this is pretty good book, but some sections are delightful. I did laugh a lot, sort of how I might at Hiassen or Leonard. One does not have to have been a serious druggie to understand this book, but it helps to have known one. The narrator is obviously out in "outer space" as he tries to ascertain exactly where his life is going, when he has no clue. Bacharach's approach to dialog confuses at first, but it serves to illustrate that the narration alternates between reporting and stream of conscious wandering. I laughed a lot.
October 23, 2018
The first third was delightful, with bonkers satire and characters like "Cat's Cradle"-level Vonnegut. The story slows down and gets less weird in the second third, and has some graceful return of the eccentric opening in the final stretch, though muted. The presentation of dialogue without punctuation slows the reading pace down to a crawl, and what started out like a really engaging fever dream for me lost steam and became far less engaging the longer the story went on. I'd love to see what Bacharach might do in short story form.
September 21, 2017
I was hoping this would have been as enticing as the reviews on the back made it out to be, but it seemed to derail in places. The plot slowly moved along, then, there was a barrage of activity, then, it deflated. At one point I thought this was a book about a hapless man who can't find an ideal relationship, later I thought I was reading a vaguely interesting Terry Pratchett novel.
November 20, 2018
Though the author clearly has talent and imagination, the plot seriously stalled out halfway through and nothing of interest was happening. This, combined with omitted quotation marks for dialogue (pet peeve) and unlikable characters made for unenjoyable reading despite the fantastical premise. Disappointing.
July 28, 2021
definitely ahead of its time in presenting the main characters from Search Party if Search Party took place in Pittsburgh, that's for sure.
I did find the absence of quotation marks a bit confusing and frustrating at times. and couldn't quite grasp the sense or meaning in a lot of the chapter breaks. but overall I really enjoyed it and look forward to reading his second novel sometime soon!
I did find the absence of quotation marks a bit confusing and frustrating at times. and couldn't quite grasp the sense or meaning in a lot of the chapter breaks. but overall I really enjoyed it and look forward to reading his second novel sometime soon!
June 4, 2017
Deeply funny, weird, sad, strange book. Pynchon's labyrinthine institutional malaise mixed with Vonnegut's dry humanism, but deeply it's own thing. I think I'll come back to this one.
November 13, 2017
I enjoyed this book - it was weird and sharp and made me laugh. But in the past few days of reading, it made me feel sort of nihilistic, so I'm glad to be done.
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December 7, 2020I should make a venn diagram delineating where my friend Jacques and the character Johnny converge and diverge
February 7, 2021
A funny modern take on Vonnegut’s style, centering on Pittsburgh and focusing on UFOs, corporate espionage, and extended adolescence.
April 26, 2021
There should be more books set in the industrial midwest
September 15, 2023
I did LOL but not LMFAO and will leave on the bookshelf for a reread.
October 29, 2024
What a strange story! I could not put it down. Finished it in two sittings. Never thought that a story like this would interest me, but it very much did.
January 28, 2025
I hope Bacharach continues to write novels.
July 13, 2025
Foucault’s Pendulum in Pittsburgh
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