The Bachelor

May 31, 2021
In this intriguing debut, Palmer expands a modest tale of writerly lassitude into an ambitious account of high and low culture. After the unnamed narrator splits with his girlfriend, a fellow novelist, he retreats from Halifax to a rented house in his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. There, he is more interested in watching a season of The Bachelor than writing. He muses on the show’s surreal setup and the roles the contestants inhabit, which often afford them second chances at love or at least stardom. (Luckily, these analyses are generally brief and restrained enough not to come off as intellectual preening.) If The Bachelor is the narrator’s lowbrow obsession, he also delves into the life and work of confessional poet John Berryman, with whom he feels he shares the mission of “trying to make things matter.” Soon enough, the narrator has a full romantic slate consisting of an intense epistolary courtship with an acquaintance in Detroit, a cautious flirtation with a recent college graduate, and an affair with his landlord (who happens to be a family friend). Readers will recognize in the narrator a well-worn type: intelligent, aimless, self-absorbed, and romantically slippery. Nonetheless, Palmer’s unexpected juxtapositions and probing spirit make this an original portrait of a lovelorn dreamer.

June 1, 2021
After breaking up with his long-term girlfriend, the 29-year-old narrator of Palmer's quiet, meditative, and fascinating debut novel returns to his hometown, Des Moines, to house-sit. While in Iowa, he struggles to write his second novel, has a few romantic missteps, and develops obsessions with the literary, the poet John Berryman, and the not-so-literary, the reality television show, The Bachelor. With incisive descriptions of the unreal reality of reality television that echo Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark (2001), Palmer's delicate shifts between the narrator's polar opposite preoccupations with Berryman and The Bachelor are reminiscent of the ambling prose of W. G. Sebald or Ben Lerner's fiction. Also like Lerner, Palmer's protagonist is incisive in his self-reflections and simultaneously completely blind to his own fortune. Palmer revels in bringing the unusual marriage of Berryman and The Bachelor to life, and as the story slowly develops, the narrator's life begins to resemble a strange blend of the two. Thoughtful, often very funny, and full of amazing passages that capture how engrossing reality television can be, this a sterling and moving debut.

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Starred review from May 15, 2021
Palmer's ruminative first novel mixes cultural analysis with the affecting story of a young man's slow reengagement with his life. The unnamed 29-year-old narrator has returned to his hometown, Des Moines, after the breakup of a long-term relationship. His first novel has been published, and he has abandoned the draft of his second. While staying at his mother's friend's house, he becomes enthralled with the reality TV show The Bachelor and with the life and work of the poet John Berryman. As he reflects on art, love, reality, and relationships, the narrator gradually rejoins the world through platonic and romantic relationships with a series of women, including an ex-turned-friend, the house's sexually liberated owner, a would-be poet, and a bookish recent graduate. When circumstances bring him to a housesitting job at a mountaintop California mansion, the protagonist discovers a tentative way forward from his self-created impasse. Some readers may question the narrator's conceit of himself as an analogue to television's Bachelor; are these many women solely present for the male hero's enlightenment? Thankfully, Palmer's female characters are interesting of their own accord, not merely in relationship to the young man telling the story, and instead of a bed-hopping serial conqueror, the hero, blocked, confused, and frustrated, can be a sad sack. Interspersed with the main narrative are reflections on love, vocation, performance, illusion, and reality occasioned by the high art of John Berryman and the mass culture of reality television. While these analyses may deter plot-oriented readers, these intriguing, amusing, provocative, and insightful passages contribute to the book's success as a novel equally concerned with the heart and the mind. A quietly accomplished and unusually constructed novel that marks the debut of a significant talent.

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