Abbott Awaits: A Novel (Yellow Shoe Fiction)
'' . . . it's a sharp and brilliant and hilarious portrait of being a parent, both explication of and anodyne to the despair that people with children sometimes feel (and are usually not courageous enough to admit to. Bachelder, bless him, is).'' --The New Yorker''Chris Bachelder'sAbbott Awaitsis a remarkable novel about a man, his daughter, his wife, his house, his yard, his neighborhood, his internet addiction, his plumbing, and most of all, his mind, which is brilliant, which is another way of saying that Bachelder is brilliant. Not since John Cheever has an American male fiction writer written so ingeniously, so beautifully, so heartbreakingly about the pain and sweetness of domestic life.'' --Brock Clarke, author ofExleyandAn Arsonist s Guide to Writers Homes in New England''Chris Bachelder has been a real force in American fiction, his work by turns savage, brilliant, generous, forlorn, and hilarious.Abbott Awaitsis another triumph, a sly and soaring novel about fear and tenderness and family, with not a lovely word wasted.'' --Sam Lipsyte, author ofThe Ask''Let's face it--some people are just funnier and smarter than you and me, and Chris Bachelder is one of them. WithAbbott Awaits,he s pretty much invented his own genre, which I'm tempted to call 'Existential Domestic Cosmology,' the kind of thing that would happen if Beckett and Whitman regarded the universe from the perspective of Homer Simpson or Ward Cleaver. On every page there's something to laugh about and something to ponder.'' --Keith Lee Morris, author ofThe Dart League King''Bachelder takes on the minutia of domesticity and turns it into something enchanting and wise. Entering each short chapter is like opening a Joseph Cornell box filled with the strangeness of the commonplace.Abbott Awaitsis a wonder.'' --Jill Ciment, author ofHeroic MeasuresChris Bachelder has moxie: who else could write a novel about the everyday life of a man awaiting his second child and make it both startling and feverish with dread?Abbott Awaitsis a lucid, tender work, full of the sort of sardonic wit that will make you poke your spouse awake at night so that you can read long passages aloud. Real life is in these pages, infuriating and gorgeous, mundane and sublime. I read it with wincing recognition and finished it feeling absurdly grateful for my own everyday life. --Lauren Groff, author ofThe Monsters of TempletonChris Bachelder is putting together a startling, innovative body of work, andAbbott Awaitsis his best book yet. One could call this novel many things: a domestic thriller; a Nicholson Baker-esque frolic through one man's quiet, crowded consciousness; a piercing examination of marriage and parenthood. Bachelder's prose is funny, cruel, devastating, knowing, and alive. I have never been happier that I do not have children after reading a novel, and yet, somehow, I have also never been sadder. --Tom Bissell, author ofExtra Lives: Why Video Games Matter