Wednesday night at 8 on KPFK: Novelist CHRIS BACHELDER. Self-doubt meets ambitious expectation in a small, wonderful, funny, perfect little novel by one of my favorite young writers, Chris Bachelder. His new book, Abbot Awaits, considers the existential meaning of parenthood, its anxiety and ecstasy, and the problem of trying to buy a couch and care for your toddler and love your wife who is expecting your second child, all while the world makes even the idea of purpose, much less procreation, so complicated, wonderful and terrifying. In Abbot --- Bachelder’s hero, a university instructor on summer break --- we find honest and wildly, darkly humorous self-doubt in the everyday, in the absurd and in the quotidian moments of being a husband and dad and human being who imagines both so much more and so much less. He is constantly anxious, fatigued, and ambivalent and of course somehow also committed to his family even as all the familiars of his previous life seem to be rearranged or disappear. Chris Bachelder is the author of one of my favorite-ever novels, US, about tenacious muckraking Left activist Upton Sinclair come back from the dead --- only to be assassinated in each chapter! --- and also the hilarious Bear v. Shark, built on the premise of the ultimate parlor game. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst
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