Pittsburgh is what Detroit could become after the auto business goes away and pro sports, hipsters, artists, academics, hospitals, banks and the residue of old money take over. In his first novel, The Bend of the World, Jacob Bacharach offers an imaginative tale of UFOs, exotic street drugs, Sasquatch, an international corporate takeover--and lots of parties.
Peter Morrison is a mid-level, cubicle-turfed, late-20-something underachiever; he is fond of his weed and Iron City beer but not so fond of parties, which he describes as "like foreign novels, interminable scenes of interactions between interchangeable personages with whom I was just familiar enough to be aware that I'd forgotten them." His childhood best friend, Johnny, is an often drug-addled gay blogger convinced a powerful "fourth river" flows beneath Pittsburgh's convergence of the Monongahela, Ohio and Allegheny. Peter has a half-hearted girlfriend whom he abandons for a beautiful depressed artist who can throw out phrases like "ontological difficulties," and then explain her erudition: "I went to art school. I learned to say a lot of things that I don't understand."
Peter gets fired; he sees a UFO. Peter could use more direction in his life and fewer psycho-pharmaceuticals. The glue that holds Bacharach's wit and general wackiness together is Pittsburgh itself. As if following a Google Maps satellite view, he takes us across the rivers, up the hills and down the alleys with a geographical precision that makes his twisted sci-fi-like story as real as the coke ovens and steel mills that once made Pittsburgh the Steel City. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.