The Bachelor
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A “witty and wise” (People) debut novel about love and commitment, celebrity and obsession, poetry and reality TV.
“Palmer’s novel wryly tracks an earnest interrogation of art and selfhood.”—The New Yorker
Reeling from a breakup with his almost fiancée, the narrator of Andrew Palmer’s debut novel returns to his hometown in Iowa to house-sit for a family friend. There, a chance flick of the TV remote and a new correspondence with an old friend plunge him into unlikely twin obsessions: the reality show The Bachelor and the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet John Berryman. As his heart begins to mend, his fascination with each deepens, and somewhere along the way, representations of reality become harder and harder to distinguish from real life. Soon he finds himself corresponding with multiple love interests, participating in an ill-considered group outing, and trying to puzzle through the strange turn his life seems to have taken.
An absorbing coming-of-age tale “that marks the debut of a significant talent” (Kirkus Reviews, starred), The Bachelor approaches—with wit and grace—the high-stakes questions of an overconnected world: If salvation can no longer be found in fame, can it still be found in romantic relationships? In an era of reality TV, where does entertainment end and reality begin? And why do we, season after season, repeat the same mistakes in love and life?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intriguing debut, Palmer expands a modest tale of writerly lassitude into an ambitious account of high and low culture. After the unnamed narrator splits with his girlfriend, a fellow novelist, he retreats from Halifax to a rented house in his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. There, he is more interested in watching a season of The Bachelor than writing. He muses on the show's surreal setup and the roles the contestants inhabit, which often afford them second chances at love or at least stardom. (Luckily, these analyses are generally brief and restrained enough not to come off as intellectual preening.) If The Bachelor is the narrator's lowbrow obsession, he also delves into the life and work of confessional poet John Berryman, with whom he feels he shares the mission of "trying to make things matter." Soon enough, the narrator has a full romantic slate consisting of an intense epistolary courtship with an acquaintance in Detroit, a cautious flirtation with a recent college graduate, and an affair with his landlord (who happens to be a family friend). Readers will recognize in the narrator a well-worn type: intelligent, aimless, self-absorbed, and romantically slippery. Nonetheless, Palmer's unexpected juxtapositions and probing spirit make this an original portrait of a lovelorn dreamer.
