In July 2019, while he was teaching at the Sewanee School of Letters, the novelist sat down with editor Adam Ross for a wide-ranging conversation about patience-ironic, since so much of his humor grows out of impatience. Shark, “particularly if you enjoy neon, is extraordinary.” Can we manage, in spite of our hardwired timorousness, to be good to each other and honor this remarkable fact of our existence? “The view from the window,” he writes in Bear v. If Bachelder has an ethics, it lies in this fact: how remarkable and mysterious that we human beings find ourselves right here, right now. Bachelder’s fictional territory is, primarily, intimacy-the struggle to nurture it and the sometimes overpowering urge to flee it-competing impulses that almost always resolve in wonder. We perform elaborate rituals and start families to distract ourselves from our dread. Whether he’s exploring male anxiety and friendship in The Throwback Special or fatherhood and marriage in Abbott Awaits, Bachelder always manages to locate that place in our hearts where fear and love battle for primacy. Chris Bachelder is deservedly considered one of America’s great comic novelists.
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