It's Hard Out Here for a Leftist: Austinist Reviews U.S.!

The first two-thirds of U.S.! is a scrap collection of McSweeney-like bits: short stories, haikus, song lyrics, transcripts of tip-line calls, reviews, letters, encyclopedia entries, interviews, and so forth. Some of these are satirical gems, such as a curriculum for fiction writing as taught by Sinclair, which pokes fun both at academia and Sinclair: “In this course, students will use journalistic techniques and sexual repression to write socially engaged, morally outraged fiction with unambiguous endings. ” Other standouts are an interview with imagined artist Samuel Treadway, which skewers the pretentiousness of modern political art, and “Midnight at the Grand,” a short story that both smartly satirizes indie films and poignantly pinpoints the experience of political repression.

Much of the rest of the “Resurrection Scrapbook” is either cute but unnecessary or just plain unnecessary (the haikus and “Some Notes on Punctuation” come to mind). And although the pieces are connected in theme, without a strong narrative thread to pull them along in a story, they feel like ephemera slapped carelessly into a scrapbook without regard for chronology or quality.

The real story in U.S.! begins at page 200, “The Greenville Anti-Socialist League Fourth of July Book Burning,” a smart, tightly written, well-paced satire in the same vein as The Lottery or The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novella, all the good elements of Bachelder’s writing—humor, self-deprecation, awareness, empathy—come together, and all the scrap gets jettisoned.

Echoing Jackson’s tale, the story begins with a quaint community tableau—the women dressed in “optimistic colors” and the men in pants that “had gradually crept up to reveal their tube socks” because “if the pants fit once, they must fit now”—that masks a darker side to the town: As the title indicates, the townspeople are planning a book burning. Much of the story is predictable: a community that prides itself on its values, a lone librarian standing against the burning, a youth awakened to new ideas. Bachelder’s story avoids being simply derivative of past works and distinguishes itself, however, through the author’s empathy for characters on both sides of the political divide, his ability to find the absurdly humorous in all situations, and his willingness to expose the chinks in his heroes’ armor.

The novella both connects to and stands apart from the scrapbook pieces in the first section of the book, so that the novella can be read and understood without having read those pieces first. The scrapbook, however, is greatly enhanced and given cohesion by the novella. Thus we recommend beginning at the end. Read the novella first. At the section breaks or when you are finished, dip at random into the bits and pieces of the scrapbook for a bit of comic relief.

This smart, unique, unconventional novel requires an unconventional reading and a willingness to put aside our expectations of what makes a novel. After all, Upton Sinclair devoted his life to challenging convention and creating new expectations. And unlike in politics, the faithful will be rewarded.

U.S.! A Novel by Chris Bachelder
Trade paperback, $14.95
Bloomsbury