U.S.!: A Novel by Chris Bachelder

From the Publisher

In this hilarious and wildly inventive novel, Chris Bachelder brings Upton Sinclair back from the dead to see what he might make of our modern world.

U.S.! is a playful, darkly comic novel that imagines the serial resurrection and assassination of tireless muckraker Upton Sinclair. In Chris Bachelder’s bizarre world, Sinclair is repeatedly brought back by beleaguered but optimistic leftists (whose refrain is “Hope and Shovels Forever”), and then gunned down (and once harpooned!) by those seeking fame, fortune, and American business as usual. As he grows more and more politically and culturally insignificant, Sinclair keeps writing his embarrassingly bad muckraking novels and keeps risking his life for the Socialist revolution, which is perpetually just around the corner.

In documenting the demise (but dogged faith) of the American Left, as well as the violence and hysteria of the Right, Bachelder uses a wide range of forms: stories, songs, letters, journal entries, book reviews, memos, a syllabus, newspaper and magazine articles, Internet auctions, and transcripts of talk shows, interviews, and toll-free hotlines. The second part of the novel is a fast-paced narrative that brings the myriad characters together in an explosive encounter. A dazzling mix of laughs and revelations, U.S.! is not only an exploration of American politics and culture, but an investigation into the possibilities and problems of political art. Its publication will coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Jungle, Sinclair’s internationally renowned novel about the meat industry.

Publishers Weekly

In his second satiric novel, following the hilarious Bear vs. Shark (2001), Bachelder supposes that muckraker Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, has the power to repeatedly rise from the grave, "oft-resurrected and oft-assassinated" by his followers and foes. A haggard and bullet-ridden Sinclair symbolizes the bedraggled American political left (making a triple entendre of the book's title). In Bachelder's present-day America, capitalism-loving smalltown residents fear a Socialist uprising spurred by the mediocre novels Sinclair continues to publish. Sinclair assassins (such as three-time killer Huntley and crazed young upstart Billings) make the cover of Time and write bestselling memoirs. The first of the novel's two main parts comprises a funny, though gimmicky, series of Sinclair ephemera, including a bile-filled book review, transcripts from the Sinclair-sighting telephone hotline and "Professor" Sinclair's writing workshop syllabus instructing students to "write socially engaged, morally outraged fiction with unambiguous endings." Part two is a gripping narrative in which an anti-Socialist book-burning becomes the converging point for Sinclair , his forlorn folksinger son Albert, competing assassins and a 12-year-old convert to liberal politics who may be the crumbling left's best hopes. Readers require no knowledge of the historical Sinclair to relate to Bachelder's bumbling, endearing idealist grandpa in this entertaining though uneven sophomore outing. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Deconstructing the legacy of muckraker Upton Sinclair, this kaleidoscopic novel gives the Old Left a postmodern spin, with results that are frequently funny and occasionally exasperating. Except for perhaps a musical comedy based on these pages, it's hard to imagine a less likely cultural artifact than this madcap romp through the lives of Upton Sinclair, best remembered for The Jungle, yet sometimes confused in these pages with Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt). Upton Sinclair died in 1968-just months after his 90th birthday, in a year that saw the class struggles to which he'd devoted his life and art take a New Left plunge into counter-culture chaos. Within the vivid imagination of Bachelder (Bear v. Shark, 2001), Sinclair never really dies-at least not for long. Instead, like the "Joe Hill" of the famous union anthem, he lives on within the movement whose ideals he had embodied. Yet Sinclair's brand of socialist Utopianism has become as anachronistic as his finger-pointing, exclamation-pointed fiction, once highly celebrated, now consigned to oblivion (he in fact won the Pulitzer Prize for 1942's long-forgotten Dragon's Teeth). Slapstick farce combines with social satire as the impossibly prolific novelist, well past 100 and showing his age, continues to proselytize to diminishing effect. He keeps writing (A Moveable Jungle!, in response to outsourcing) and keeps dying, killed by assassins who become folk heroes for defending the American way of life. Amid the vast indifference of the public at large, he and his adversaries form a symbiotic relationship, each needing the other. Though the novel's depiction of an impotent, intellectually bankrupt leftist movement in America might anger liberalsympathizers, Bachelder ultimately proves an equal-opportunity offender, capable of enraging those on both sides of the cultural divide. Ultimately, his comic vision sparks a comparatively serious inquiry into the nature, power and possibilities of art, in these times, in this country. Imagine E.L. Doctorow (who makes an appearance in these pages) on psychedelic mushrooms.

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