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.

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