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 structured around a cup of coffee, scoring a little weed, jobs that come and go.

Coalescing at all-night parties that flood the air with music, they indulge with absentminded passion in local intrigue and the broken promises of love. Young, rebellious, and vulnerable, Michael Hornburg's unforgettable characters trace the subtle outlines of a misunderstood generation. Moving from Portland to New York City and back again, and written in precise, startlingly original prose, Bongwater is in the tradition of the Beat classics The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums.