[REVIEW] The End of the City by David Bendernagel

Pink Fish Press
252 pages, $13.49

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

David Bendernagel’s experimental novel The End of the City is a Joyce-like rabbit hole of loss, introspection, and grief. It follows key points in the life of the main character – a guy named Ben Moor – from awkward high school athlete to trained assassin. It vacillates between the character’s past and present so often that you are not always sure of what is happening when. But that is Bendernagel’s intention.

The novel opens in Reston, a city that is noted for both its ruralness and its seedy New Jersey-like charm. To main character Ben, Reston is like a version of Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands – only without the poisonous waste and Jimmy Hoffa:

This place is a chink in the armor, a soft spot in a bad tooth. Here on the outskirts, the city’s street grid is bent out of shape, like a fence mangled by escapees wielding wire cutters—snapped, peeled apart, pushed through. The gully looks like it was created by a car bomb; the real cause was the collapse of an underground cave. The roads glitter with broken glass and come to an end at the edge of the gully, the pavement crumbling and falling into this depression. … On the other side of the gully—scrawny branch tangles, a junkyard overtaken by vines. Civilization crept across this boundary and failed or hasn’t yet taken hold.

What this intersection of urban and rural reminds me of is what is referred to as an ecotone, the scientific term for the hazy, indeterminate area where two distinct ecosystems overlap. Ecotones fascinate me as a system to classify landscapes because they are also about the point in which boundaries blur and, like Reston, become a new kind of center, a periphery where things stay in flux.

This sense of middleness – of middleness as a site where things are meant to happen – is an idea the novel is preoccupied with. For example, towards the beginning, Ben states:

In the beginning, there is nothing.
In the end, the same.
This is a place. It is in the middle, and that’s all.

And much later, he reiterates this, stating, “The middle is actually a frequent place for a narrator to begin. An ending can also happen in the middle.” This dynamic center where two distinct systems overlap as the place where stories and meaning are made becomes a kind of leitmotif.

There are a number of interesting plot themes, but one that fascinated me centers on Ben’s inability to psychologically separate the public tragedy of 9/11 from his own private tragedy over his father’s death in a car accident. They are often spoken of in tandem. For example, in one part, Ben notes that:

The universe begins with an explosion. It ends with an implosion.
A heart valve bursts. A collision crushes a black sports car.
Jet fuel goes up. Two towers collapse.
A dream is assessed and found to be without value. It must be woken up from.
Abandoned. Or destroyed.

The two are conflated so often that Ben frequently uses the one to understand the other. In one scene, he and his brother watch an old tape of the World Trade Center collapsing on 9/11 over and over because it helps them understand what their father experienced when he died. Ben then states that, “Inside a burning building, or a dad’s black Nissan that has collapsed into the trunk of a tree on an empty lot, as a metal frame begins to melt, those that survive the initial impact scream out in terror.” The two events have blurred into one, and we can’t tell whether it is the 9/11 victims or his father that “survive[d] the initial impact [to] scream out in terror.” The public and the private bleed together to create a new landscape – one where what happens to us and what happens around us cannot be distinguished from each other in any meaningful way.

Another aspect of the novel that fascinated me is the way that Bendernagel interweaves pop culture references with tragic, pathetic scenarios. These references are important because the novel’s language is dense – it’s pure stream of consciousness in parts – and you start to feel a kind of heavy vertigo while reading – like spinning in a circle but underwater. So when you read off-hand references to Batman or Teen Wolf as you spin through the lyrical, Woolf-like language, they function as tiny focal points that in their familiarity help you catch your breath again.

They also work to blend the borders between our idea of high culture and pop culture as what facilitates tragedy to best be communicated in a way that moves us. For example, when remembering his father’s funeral, Ben slips in a Karate Kid reference among the maudlin sentiment:

I’m living in a post-postapocalyptic world, what Mr. Miyagi referred to tauntingly as ‘after after.’ I’m dressed for the sports banquet in the same black suit I wore to my father’s funeral. Each moment of my life feels like a simulation of one that came before it, and the formative experiences themselves seem like simulacra, each ball game and race a mock trial, preparation for another just like it. What might be deemed real, what might have served as what Oprah calls an ‘aha! moment’ had no immediate effect on me. Mom cried her way through Dad’s wake.

In the world of the book, where borders bleed together – the tragic death of a parent – and Karate Kid – hold equal emotive weight as what is best able to communicate what is most human about us. After all, language (and our associations to it) can be changed. We can elevate the silly or superficial with enough elbow grease and shoe polish.

The End of the City is a texturally dense fabric of overlapping systems in conflict: the present and past, the urban and rural, the public and private. Regardless of what is happening in the complicated, intertwining storylines, the incomparably fluid and mesmerizing language never flags. It washes over us again and again as we read – powerful and magnetic. It’s worth reading simply for that alone.

***
Hannah Rodabaugh received her MA from Miami University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Her work was included in Flim Forum Press’ anthology: A Sing Economy. Her work has been published in Defenestration, Used Furniture Review, Palimpsest, Similar:Peaks::, Horse Less Press Review, Smoking Glue Gun, Drupe Fruits, and Nerve Lantern. Her chapbook, With Words: Verse in Concordance, is forthcoming from dancing girl press.