Book Information

Title

Bedford

Author

Pat Lawrence

Publisher

Six Gallery Press

List Price

$12.00

ISBN

0-9726301-9-8

Length

166 pages

about the book

The author is cynical and vain; the book is narrated autobiographically, though fictional-- The story of a misogynist with Amiri Baraka for a roommate who drinks and fights his way out of the life of the woman downstairs.

The narrative ignores the rules of reality and supplants them with the rules of fiction. Baraka acts as conduit for the supernatural and for wisdom into the cold, rash, alcoholic life of the narrator and protagonist, Abel.

Unfortunately, the struggle is decidedly one-sided as the immovability of his heart and the supremacy of his ego alienate the two people who would overcome his nature to bring him out of the pit he has no intention of leaving.

Pat Lawrence wrote Bedford as his first novel. It draws from his experiences as a child growing up in Indiana, and on the literary influences of Joyce, Garcia-Marquez, Vonnegut, and Bukowski. It is full of pseudo-realistic stories and people and events which are either starkly real or sublimely unreal. This dualism persists throughout the novel, arranging the dichotomy between past and present and pastoral and urban.

It also blurs the line between character and narrator as each character is allowed to tell their side of major events, including the protagonist's inclusion of alleged excerpts from the diaries of his roommate. In this way the narrator is able to both link himself intricately with the story and revel in his own subjectivity.

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