The Bachelor by Andrew Palmer

Published by Penguin/Hogarth Press on July 20, 2021

A young man confronts his emptiness as he befriends or dates several women while contemplating the reality TV show that share’s the novel’s title. The Bachelor follows the unnamed narrator for a period of several weeks as he ruminates upon his life while approaching his thirtieth birthday.

The narrator is a writer whose agent is waiting for a second novel that the narrator hasn’t started. He claims to be working on a story based on his grandfather’s life, but he lost interest in writing fiction after breaking up with Ashwani. They were both young writers in New York when they met and fell in love. After the narrator’s first novel was published, he reluctantly moved to Halifax, where Ashwani had taken a prestigious teaching position and was awaiting publication of her first novel. Their relationship deteriorated within months. They cancelled a planned a trip to Mumbai to visit Ashwani’s parents and the narrator instead decided to fly to Des Moines, where he has been offered the opportunity to housesit for his mother’s friend Sadie, who now lives in New York but isn’t ready to sell her Iowa home.

During a layover in Detroit as he travels to to Des Moines, the narrator reconnects with Maria, a poet he befriended in New York who now lives in an old Detroit mansion that offers living and working space to artists. In the mansion, the narrator comes across and steals a bad biography of the poet John Berryman. When he later confesses the theft to Maria, she sends him Berryman’s much better biography of Stephen Crane. Thinking that Berryman deserves a biography of similar quality, the narrator begins intermittent research of Berryman’s life, loves, and poetry. Berryman’s relationships with women, like the Bachelor’s relationships with contestants for his love, frame the protagonist’s own relationships.

The narrator fills time in Des Moines by watching and rewatching episodes of The Bachelor. The bachelor in this season is appearing for the second time, having come to regret his failure to select a mate in the first turn at bat. This time, he tells the audience, he has truly dedicated his heart to finding his perfect love. The narrator deconstructs the show with particular focus upon the need for female contestants to open up, to show their vulnerability, to discuss the tragedies that they have survived, all to demonstrate their ability to engage in an honest and open relationship that will prove their worthiness as a future wife. Allowing the reader to share the guilty pleasure that the narrator takes in The Bachelor while exposing its formulaic nature is the novel’s signature accomplishment.

In Des Moines, the narrator meets and dates a young woman named Jess who works for the dry cleaner. He has brooding telephone conversations with Laura, a college girlfriend with whom he has maintained a friendship. He spends time with Sadie when she visits the house. They connect over The Bachelor — a show that Sadie had dismissed before watching it — and use it as a springboard for discussing love and developing a love of their own.

Sadie introduces the narrator to a wealthy friend who wants him to housesit a ridiculously expensive home at the top of a mountain in Napa while it’s being renovated. The isolation, when Sadie isn’t visiting, gives the narrator more time to brood and think about Berryman. After returning to Iowa for an extended stay with his parents, he visits Minneapolis to dip into Berryman’s archives, where he strikes up a friendship with Dierdre. Where any of these friendships/relationships will go is uncertain, and the novel’s ending leaves them all up in the air.

The narrator sees himself in Berryman, having “spent a good deal of my life engaged in the exhausting and mostly thankless battle of trying to make things matter.” Like Berryman, “nothing sufficed. There was a hole in the middle of his world.” The narrator, on the other hand, is doing little to fill his hole as he contemplates the Chicago Bulls of his youth, recalls reading his brother’s determinedly literary journal entries, dissects Bachelor episodes, and thinks about (and occasionally calls) his former lovers. Berryman at least wrote some decent poetry. The narrator doesn’t do much of anything, apart from writing determinedly literary emails, having heartfelt discussions, and learning to swim.

Berryman wrote: “At thirty men think reluctantly back over their lives.” That pretty much summarizes The Bachelor, except that the narrator isn’t particularly reluctant to look back over a life that stopped amounting to much after he published his novel. The narrator recognizes that he disappeared from himself at some point. It seems like he might be ready to work past that emptiness, but it is far from certain where his life will go. Readers who want definitive endings — or any ending — to a novel won’t find one here. But as a snapshot of a life, The Bachelor is noteworthy for its ability to make the reader think about John Berryman’s thinking and for its subtle suggestion that people script their relationships in much the same way that contestants give detailed thought to how they will need to present themselves on the “unscripted” episodes of The Bachelor.

RECOMMENDED