 It was Miss Pink – fellow member of the Iowan Heritage Society for the Betterment of Po-Po-Mo Lit, Big Red Alumni Boosters Association, and the Aurora, Colorado chapter of the Mensa Daytime Television Appreciation League – that first introduced me to Chris Bachelder.
She turned me onto his debut novel, Bear v. Shark (Scribner, 2001). A borderline-brilliant little book chronicling the degradation of society, through a series of bite-size snapshots – snapshots that, at times, feel as if you are reading the exact same scene over again, but contain uncommonly beautiful, subtle differences with each succeeding glimpse. The world of Bear v. Shark bears a definite resemblance to our technology-assimilated society, yet at the same time retains a surreal otherworldliness. It is a society that obsessively focuses on a match up between a virtual bear versus a virtual shark, shown on a Jumbotron screen in the center of a stadium, as if it were the Super Bowl. It is a world that is at once hilarious and haunting; one that stays with the reader and forces them to face the present world surrounding them, and the grotesque possibilities of their future world.
In this same vein, Bachelder has written his newest novel, U.S.! : a novel (Bloomsbury USA, 2006). A satire of fusillade snapshots about a leader-starved Left movement continually exhuming and resurrecting the corpse of the famous, revolutionary-figurehead, Socialist writer, Upton Sinclair. (Of the Jane staff, Stacey would be voted the most likely to exhume Upton for the betterment of the present. She loves her some Upton.) Each succeeding wave of revolutionaries pin their hopes on the ever-hopeful, desiccating, animated corpse of Upton Sinclair to save the day. And laying in wait are Upton’s numerous assassins looking to make a name for themselves. Often he is killed, only to be resurrected again. He writes incessantly (Bachelder even parodies this massive output by having a faux-syllabus for an advanced writing class taught by Upton, where the student is expected to write four novels in a semester!), continually falling into the same formulaic trap each time that a writer faces when attempting to combine art and political agenda, and the reviewers (just as they often did in his own time) rake him across the coals for his effort. Upton reads the reviews and views each knock against him as a boost. Certain jibes from reviewers and detractors are interpreted as the movement beginning to get under the big wigs’ skin. As I say, he is a kindly, if not sometimes clueless, old man with enough optimism to fuel a suicide party into a sunrise of smiles (much like the continual tongue-in-cheek joke, throughout the book, about how many exclamation points Upton used in his novels!). Nobody takes him terribly seriously – he is seen as antiquated and a one-trick pony, often mistaken (in name only) for the writer Sinclair Lewis – but they all recognize the importance of him as a figure to the movement. Throughout you get the feeling that Upton’s lean, battered body is the embodiment of America’s Left, at present. A movement scrabbling for any vestige of hope they can get a hold of in the face of a hysterical Right-dominated government.
The first half of U.S.! Is a series of seemingly disparate pieces – i.e., short stories, letters, book reviews, Internet interviews, video game reviews, FBI-sponsored Upton Sinclair sightings hotline comments, et cetera. A mishmash series of multimedia snippets that come at you with the speed and diversity of channel-surfing, yet, in the end, introduce you to all the main players of the story to come in the second half of the book. The second half is a tale of the feverish showdown of assassins, Upton, his son, a 12 year old revolutionary convert, and the Greenville Anti-Socialist League at an annual Four of July book burning.
Bachelder continually avoids the pratfall of being cliche or formulaic when undertaking the task of combining art and politics in this book. At times, one might point out style similarities to inventive writers such as Gaddis or Barthelme, but Bachelder is definitely his own writer. He takes material from others and weaves it into his own unique, satiric vision. It is fresh and amusing. Hilarious and sad.
Some reviewers have pegged this book as being uneven, but I beg to differ. I believe that Bachelder’s writing in U.S.! – the parodying of multimedia outlets – is a mirror image of the world around us. We don’t get the full story of people at present in a traditional story arc; we get it via disparate Google hits. Good satire is never too far removed from the true image of world; the closer to the truth, the funnier it is. But what makes satire real art is when it infuses human spirit and truth, as well. Near the end, Bachelder accomplishes this with a pitch-perfect foreshadowing of the classic struggle between child and parent and their differing political views. It is an image that anyone will recognize right away and sympathize with. As well as a touching scene between Upton and his son, via telepathy, that I could envision Wes Anderson using in a movie. And the very end is an E-bay posting of a song written by Upton’s son that, taken out of context might not be so great, but kept in context amazingly sums up the book and its message.
Things learned from this book:
- Upton ran for governor of California as a Socialist in 1934.
- Upton believed in telepathy.
- Upton was friends with luminaries such as Einstein, Theodore Roosevelt, Ezra Pound, et cetera. (Though their assessments of his work and his beliefs were not always kind... even downright cruel, at times.)
- Upton, at one time, predicted that the newspaper magnate and subject of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst (of all people!), would be America’s great Socialist President of the future. (How wrong could a guy be?! Socialism and Hearst are like oil and water!)
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