Dead men allegedly tell no tales. But in Chris Bachelder's antic satire U.S.!, mystical resurrection begets the renewed ability to write dreadful, politically transparent fiction. The word-slinging stiff in question—famed muckraking author of The Jungle (1906) and avowed socialist Upton Sinclair—is serially reanimated and assassinated countless times after his "death" in 1968, having written an astounding 87 books by the age of 90. Dogged productivity carries no reward for the undead: Sinclair's murderers are accorded increasingly more acclaim as each successive novel is met with proportionate amounts of critical vitriol. A righteously absurd, corporeal allegory for the demise of the radical Left in America and a meditation on the efficacy of the political novel, Bachelder's vicious cycle of afterlife and death is also malevolently funny.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:35 PM  |