Benderland is a novel I wrote in 2016, and it’s one of best things I’ve ever written—and also the most challenging. Writing a novel is not like writing nonfiction. You have to worry about character development, pace, dialogue, plot, and all the other narrative elements making for a good story. I spent about two years crafting it to be both unique and accessible, to pack it with action and not lose the theme, and I’ve heard from the small group of “cult” followers who have discovered it that it’s a fantastic and captivating read. Why haven’t you heard of it? There’s a great reason: I never made one iota of an attempt to market it! I wrote it to write. That’s how it started anyway. It began as an exercise in improving my nonfiction writing skills, but it ended with a more soul searching quest to tell an interesting, visceral, and (you always hope) important tale. A story worth reading. Now, in retrospect, I’m grateful I suffered through those cold long hours in a Seattle Starbucks. I believe it made me a better writer. And I believe I told an engaging story, with an important anti-mechanistic, humanist theme.
A reader comment (who I don’t know but much appreciate):
Don’t judge this book by its cover. I will attempt to describe it and maintain I don’t ruin it. At first glance it might seem like a book about the alcoholic escapades of a character by the name of Jake. Really it’s a trip into the mind of a man troubled and dissatisfied with modern life. Follow his reckless attempt to find something deeper, to experience people and the world in all its’ pricelessness. Benderland isn’t a place, but a searching mindset and alcohol is merely a catalyst.
Another, much appreciated and spot on:
This is a strange, energetic odyssey about a software guy that throws everything a way and goes off on a romp through California with a ragtag bunch of people he met along the way. The pace of the book is intoxicating. I've never really read anything like it, so it's hard to compare. There's a strong theme of loss and growing addiction, but it's developed alongside Jake's (the main character) musings about whether the modern world itself is in a much worse predicament. Fascinating and troubling read. I recommend it!
A few points here. One, yes I did live in Palo Alto and I did own a company at the time of the events in the novel, circa 2012. However, the protagonist is a pastiche of different people I met there, plugged as it were into the epicenter of the software/AI world, and the events while “based on actual events” as they say are in the end fictionalized. It’s a novel. As in: a fictional piece of writing. But those who know me will see bits and pieces of me—and in particular my life in the early 2010s—in Jake.
Second point, the novel has a sort of in-your-face Hunter S. Thomas feel to it, replete with boozing and all its accoutrements, “vignettes,” which are essentially ephemeral romances (to stretch the word a bit), and plenty of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” vibes. It’s easy to mistake it as an account of a person descending into the trap of libertine existence, and it is that in plot and event, but thematically it’s more a statement that’s germane to Colligo: how do we escape the ordered mechanical world we’ve created for ourselves? Where is the Ariadne’s thread guiding us out of the labyrinth of our machineland? The protagonist, Jake, offers us one tragically entertaining though clearly ill-advised option. In his desperation and inevitable return to “reality,” I want to suggest to readers that, properly rejecting self-destructive escapism, how exactly do we follow the thread out of the trap we’ve ourselves made?
I encourage you to read the novel. (I shouldn’t mention this, I suppose, but if you don’t buy it, you’ll have endless troubles. Just a joke.) And, thank you. I don’t write at all unless I’m at the absolute top of the craft. Sincerely yours,
Erik J. Larson