barrettcmyk's review against another edition
3.0
really unique writing style -- a very fragmented, clipped, and snarky (yet pathetic) look at our media-saturated ridiculous society. but what i loved about the writing style, i also found annoying -- it reads like you're flipping channels on a television, which isn't entirely beneficial when your attention span is already somewhat limited.
just sayin'.
just sayin'.
rosseroo's review
2.0
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 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.
More...