The bachelor

Reeling from a breakup with his almost-fiancée, the narrator of Andrew Palmer's first novel returns to his hometown in Iowa to house-sit for a family friend. There, a chance flick of the TV remote and a correspondence with an old grad school classmate plunge him into unlikely twin obsessions: the reality TV show The Bachelor and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman. As his heart begins to mend, his fixation with each deepens and calcifies, and somewhere along the way, art and "reality" become harder and harder to distinguish from life. Love interests accumulate and then fall away: an old girlfriend calls and he answers; he meets a young woman at the dry cleaner. Soon he finds himself corresponding intimately, regularly with other suitors (as Berryman did in his lifetime), participating in a group outing (as The Bachelor does each season), and trying to puzzle through the strange turn his life seems to have taken. A genuinely absorbing and intellectually ambitious coming-of-age tale, The Bachelor tells the story of finding one's footing in love and art, even as it tunnels deep into our cultural obsession with fame and "reality." If salvation can no longer be found in fame, can it still be found in love and marriage? In an era in which reality TV can make two dozen women love one man in six weeks, where does entertainment end and reality begin? Why do we, season after season, repeat the same mistakes in love and life?