Colorado College prof hones his satirical edge

Mary J. Elkins, Special to the News

Friday, February 24, 2006

Chris Bachelder, an assistant professor at Colorado College, is something of a rising star.

His first novel, Bear v. Shark, was well-received, with reviewers praising his mad humor and biting satire of contemporary American culture and some even likening him to Don DeLillo. With his second novel, he continues in the same vein in both strengths and a few weaknesses.

One criticism leveled at Bear v. Shark had to do with the novel centering on one joke and eventually running out of steam. In that novel, the joke is a Las Vegas big event, a fight between these two feared killers from the animal world. In U.S.!, the joke centers on an historical figure, the famous muckraker and author of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair. Here is how the novel begins:

"Tony was driving - he had his father's old four-door Plymouth Valiant - so it was me in the back seat with Upton Sinclair. He slouched away from me against the door, and as far as I could tell, he still wasn't breathing. He smelled overpoweringly of the earth - metallic, elemental, potted."

The reason for the odor is that Sinclair has just been dug up from his grave. In fact, this often happens to him. Every few years some young leftists desperately in search of a leader dig him up, and then, shortly thereafter, some right-wingers assassinate him (usually with a gun, but once with a harpoon). This is just the latest in a string of resurrections. During the periods in which he is alive, he gives lectures, writes letters, churns out more earnest and boring novels of social injustice. He also campaigns steadily for a national conversion to socialism and to the metric system.

Bachelder employs many of the same devices as used in Bear vs. Shark. The narrative is untraditional. He roams the cultural landscape, telling his tale through folk songs, book reviews, eBay auctions (someone is selling a bullet purportedly used in one of the assassinations), talk show transcripts.

At one point, we are given a copy of the syllabus for a creative writing class that Sinclair is teaching as a visiting professor. Here are the "course objectives": "In this course students will use journalistic techniques and sexual repression to write socially engaged, morally outraged fiction with unambiguous endings. Students will also grow their own food on the narrow but fertile strip of land that runs between the Junior Faculty Parking Lot and the Graduate Student Parking Lot. On Wednesdays we will fast."

At another point, Sinclair contacts the novelist, E.L. Doctorow, and invites him to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, hoping to talk Doctorow into writing a blurb for his next novel. During the dinner he argues that although he admires Doctorow's social conscience, he finds his novels flawed by too much "art." (He doesn't get the blurb.)

Sinclair also writes letters to public figures. He writes to Arnold Schwarzenegger (Sinclair once ran unsuccessfully for governor of California) and to NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. At the end of his long letter to Tagliabue suggesting ways the game could be made fairer, he adds a postscript, asking, "Please help an old man understand why the New York Jets play their matches in New Jersey at a venue called Giants Stadium."

For two-thirds of its length, the novel skips around lightly, taking quick jabs at easy targets and keeping the reader smiling and even laughing out loud at the author's outrageous jokes. And then the novel shifts gears a bit, and the narrative becomes more conventional and a bit more serious. The pace picks up and we're moved toward a conclusion that may or may not prove tragic.

Although Sinclair comes across in the novel as often quite ridiculous, Bachelder clearly has some affection for the old man and gives him a few moving moments. It's no accident that U.S.! is being published on the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Jungle.

The comparisons of Bachelder with DeLillo are, although intended to be flattering, not all that helpful. There are some obvious stylistic and temperamental similarities, but Bachelder is his own writer, not a paler version of a famous and influential writer.

The novel isn't perfect. As was the case with Bear v. Shark, the joke hangs around a little too long and wears a bit thin.

But the joke is, by no means, the whole of the book. Underneath his wise-guy humor, there is a warm, and even gentle, presence in his books.

I'm looking forward to the next one.

Mary J. Elkins is a faculty member in the Honors College at Colorado State University. She lives in Fort Collins.