Patchogue is a village on Long Island sixty miles from New York City. A man now married and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan decides to return to the village where he grew up. He carries the dead heaped on his shoulders and the memory of the first love that sent him forth from the village, both fortunate and cursed by this memory. The trip to and from Patchogue assumes he contours of the oldest journey of all: the search for paradise, impelled by the embarrassment of reality. Yes, it is always greener on the other side of the fence, but then that grass has been well fertilized by heaps of decay and rottenness. Written in a prose that recalls Celine"s, Going to Patchogue is a moral book that will be misjudged as racist and bitter only by those who thought Swift wanted modestly to put Irish babies on sale in the London meat markets. It is a book of flesh and guts, of blood, sperm, and saliva. But to go to Patchogue is also to go to Paris, Venice, Istanbul, to Sofia. Because the traveler doesn"t want to repeat the same journey back, he returns via Bulgaria, Istanbul, and the Villa Paradiso in Padua, the ironically named journey"s end of this travel book for those who never travel.