Bongwater

by Michael Hornburg

Bongwater is a novel that wavers along the solar eclipse of the American Dream, a neo-Beat, grungeoisie love story that has all the authenticity and none of the pretension of its forerunners, a book that will be for the slacker generation of the nineties what Bright Lights, Big City was for the wannabe eighties. Set mainly under the sodden gray skies of Portland, Oregon, the novel renders the intimate lives of a subculture whose cast-off expectations have left its members all the more exposed. Vaguely troubled, and with an edge of palpable longing, there is David, a filmmaker whose esoteric projects fail to find an audience before they go up in flames; a flamboyant, retroglam gay couple whose squat David moves into; Courtney, David's beautiful, brokenhearted roommate, who flees to the East Village and takes up with a new boyfriend, Tommy, a paranoid rock star; and Mary, a young stripper with an unlimited sense of adventure. They circulate lazily on the perimeters of society, their days