Bear v. Shark: The Novel

“Everything will be fine. In Las Vegas, everything will be made right. The spectacle transforms, it redeems.”Bear v. Shark is 2016 National Book Award-nominee Chris Bachelder’s debut novel, and it is a real trip, let me tell you. An exercise in postmodernism, it draws clear parallels to Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Frederick Barthelme and the other big names in this literary genre.The story revolves around one central question: who would win in a fight, a bear or a shark? In Bachelder’s extreme version of America—an America in which people are enslaved by their desire for mindless amusement and entertainment— there’s a large corporation that has managed to monetize the obsession with this question by pitting these two animals against each other at an annual event in Las Vegas. The spectacle captivates the nation, driving people into a frenzy.This year, young Curtis Norman is the lucky winner of the Bear v. Shark essay contest, and has secured he and his family seats to the coveted event. The Normans set out on a road trip to Las Vegas that’s every bit as bizarre as anything you’ve ever read. The central character here is actually Larry Norman, Curtis’s father, who is determined to do right by his family, yet secretly yearns for a more meaningful life.A razor sharp satire about America’s media-saturated culture, Bear v. Shark is so stylistically distinct that it took some getting used to. But once I became familiar with Bachelder’s (purposefully) jumbled narration—a barrage of TV and radio personalities, Bear v. Shark theorists, commercials, Bear v. Shark essays, and of course the traditional narrative following the Norman’s journey—I couldn’t get enough.David Foster Wallace famously bemoaned some of the tenets of postmodernism, and in doing so used the genre to transcend irony and cynicism and return to a place of deep emotion and sentimentality. It seems that Bachelder had this in mind when he wrote Bear v. Shark. At the heart of his satire lies not disdain and mockery, but genuine sadness and empathy.“Aren’t satirists just sentimental and oversensitive cranks who just wish the world were a kinder place and furthermore sort of believe that it could be a kinder place and it is therefore tragic that it’s such a cruel and stupid place?”

I bought this book because the author is my friend's neighbor (say "howdy" to Henry for me, Chris)and I bought it used, cheap. Authors don't make any money on used book sales, and I feel a little bad about that because this here is a fine piece of what the pretty folks call "litter-chure." It's witty, ironic, and well done, and maybe best of all the chapters are short so it's great for in the bathroom. If I didn't own this book, I'd buy it new because Bachelder is the sort of author we want to support. That is, he is pretty good at what he does and we will all benefit from his writing more of these fine books.

I'd call this book a waste of time, but since it only takes a couple of hours to read, that description is inaccurate. Nontheless, I can say it contains nothing of value. Any critics likening Chris Bachelder to Vonnegut need to re-read Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse Five, then publish a retraction.

got this for a friends son in college, no complaints so far, part of a required reading list,so far so good

Book came as guaranteed and is in vreat condition. A required book for one of my college classes

Great concept

Disturbing and relevant.

I came to this first book by Bachelder having absolutely loved his second (U.S.!) and mostly enjoyed his fourth (The Throwback Special). This one very much feels like a first book in all the best and worst ways -- and I'd say reading it almost twenty years after it's publication, it's more of a curiosity than anything else. If I had to guess, I'd say that as a kid, Bachelder read the mass-market pulp book "The Predators", which is about the staging of a grizzly vs. great white fight in a South American country for pay-for-view TV. Then when in college, he (like me) read Neil Postman's critique of TV culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death in an intro to media studies course (the book is quoted from four times in the novel). Then he went to grad school and read a lot of Pynchon, Calvino, Borges, Vonengut, Barthelme, DeLillo, et al. and absorbed the techniques of postmodern fiction and criticism. And then he cranked out his own satirical critique of America's television-obsessed cultural landscape.The book has only a notional plot -- an all-American family of four has won a trip to the independent country of Las Vegas to attend the second "Bear v. Shark" battle royale. This event has captured the complete attention of the country and is the dominant cultural entertainment, albeit one in which computer-generated animals are used instead of real ones, since real animals would look fake. (That should give you a good sense of the tone.) The characters are wafter-thin, and the book consists mainly of their road-trip to Vegas.This is accomplished in100 chapters of 2-3 pages each, flipping wildly between fragments, riffs, commercials, dialogue, transcripts, and on and on and on. This appears to be an attempt to recreate on the written page the effect of someone flipping TV channels every 30 seconds, and I found it more exhausting than compelling, but it's an interesting attempt. Jokes both subtle and not abound, as do all manner of games with language that, again, get wearying (presumably intentionally so). The internet appears around the edges as an amplifier of the culture, and one can almost sense the author's sweating to finish the book before the internet has completely replaced television as the screen of cultural domination. All in all, marginally interesting and not that effective.

The novel starts off on a high, portraying an America where the burning (and effectively only) issue of the day is whether a bear or a shark would win in a fight. Characters deliver misquotations and misappropriations from historical figures and literary greats as they argue about their alignment across hundreds of TV channels, in the streets, schoolrooms, restaurants and churches, distracted from everything else to the point of lunacy.When a boy writes a prizewinning essay about the upcoming fight, he and his family win tickets to watch the event ringside, and witness the divisions it produces in a nation who care less and less about politics, religion, disasters, literature, or anything else unless relating directly to this simulated fight. Trivia questions appear in school textbook extracts, commercials promote the most ridiculous products imaginable (Hernia Soda: for a taste so heavy, you'll need a spotter!), panel shows debate whether Shakespeare was bear or shark, no-one focuses on events long enough to conclude them-even the chapters are shortened to as little as a paragraph each to help convey this feeling.There's lots of references to Neil Postman and similar authors on this state of constant absorption, and while the caricatured America is a bit overdone, it's a funny portrait of things already there, like election fever and total attention on trivial issues like celebrity weddings or causes.The constant bear/shark jokes and the malaprops make the plot fall flat, though, and the short-chapters, cut-up sentences format, while amusing at first, made me wonder whether the author was as distracted as his characters.Having said that, it's amusing, a great first novel, and if you've read Amusing ourselves to Death or The Medium is the Message, you'll find it an enjoyable and oddly thought-provoking distraction yourself.