If Alienz entered The Great Gatsby… The Bend of the World
Jacob Bacharach’s THE BEND OF THE WORLD
It’s weird how much a book that’s supposedly about aliens feels like a modern day Great Gatsby. Scattered, boozy, filled with excess, green lights and less-than-faithful relationships, Jacob Bacharach’s The Bend of the World reads like dystopian Fitzgerald.
So it starts out that the skies of Pittsburgh may or may not be filled with flying saucers and alien interactions. At least, people are saying that they’re seeing these things all over, but, no one can really know whether these people are nuts, drunk, in it for the story or hypochondriacs. The mayor is definitely telling people the whole aliens things is bullshit after the blog dedicated to extraterrestrial sightings photoshopped together this picture of him getting probed in a less than hetero-sexual fashion.
Peter Morrison sees a saucer or a spaceship or a drunken blur one night, and basically the rest of the story is a long, drawn-out pondering of whether what he say was in fact aliens, or more like, a metaphor for the end of the world, or maybe the end of his world, or maybe just the end of a specific aspect of his life.
Am I misleading you? This book is really, hardly about aliens, despite what the cover may make it look like. What it is like are the following words: dark, comedic, disorganized, disjointed, rambling, erratic, amazing,
Seeing the spaceship of course happens on the night Peter’s life is just undergoing this big shakeup. Previously, he was just this office drone guy that didn’t do any real droning, or really, anything during his hours sitting at a desk he refuses to decorate. He’s seeing this girl with two first names, Laura Sara, who makes art that basically looks like chairs, or at least sculptures that would confuse visitors in art galleries over whether or not this is an exhibit or a rest area, and his best friend at this point is gay-butterfly Johnny. It’s not that he’s even dissatisfied with his life at this point; Peter Morrison is just ambivalent to the entirety of it.
Then there’s the night he sees the flying saucer – or well, he thinks he does. It’s also the night he meets this Buchanan-esque couple, Mark and Helen, and drinks so much with the two of them it makes me dizzy thinking about it. Back to the Buchanans: Mark’s the new man in Peter’s office (his office, by the way, is hilariously blank. Called Global Solutions, their motto is essential –not quoted here- “Global Solutions for a Global World.”), with some mysterious, maybe lawyer-type job that seems essential to be the role that George Clooney had in that one movie “Up in the Air,” where he plays that like, super corporate guy that offices hire to come in and fire their employees so they don’t have to. Then Helen. Helen is just, I don’t even know, the perfect girl maybe? She’s great at pool, glamorous to the point she’s over it and a true artist like Laura Sara would love to be. Peter is instantly obsessed with these two.
It hurts though – could Gatsby and Nick have been the same character? Could the main male in the romance section of the book be the same, impartial, along for the ride, reveling in the new money Nick? It’s as if the two guys – one striving for everything (the wealth, the name, the girl), the other watching and waiting – balanced each other, creating a whole new, 21st century person named Peter from the foils.
To balance out how lit-nerd that last paragraph was, plus, to get you acquainted with how scattered this book is, here’s a list of other topics this book covers: Bigfoot (or Sasquatch, if you will), Keurig coffee refills, Nazis, strip clubs, Alieyinz, funerals, drugs, etc. There’s a lot going on. It’s incredibly fun.
