What I want to do is compose a lucid, concise posting about red reading. A series of lucid, concise postings about red reading. What I'm likely to do, what I already find myself doing, as a function of snatching small bits of time, or I'd like to think that's the primary explanation, is circling around the topic. Or maybe it's a more rectangular sort of approach. Coming at it from all sorts of oblique angles--what the hell does my cataract surgery have to do with it, for example--and managing to dart toward the core only occasionally. I hope my ramblings will intersect with my stated concern here, the red reading life, more and more frequently as I proceed. That is after all the point.
Which is my way of excusing myself for reporting that what I found myself thinking about while I ran errands on the first part of my lunch hour today was the novels of Chris Bachelder. His first novel, Bear vs. Shark, was great. His second, U.S.!, is the one that came to my mind as I walked. I was thinking about the capitalist economic crisis and the way that most politicians (with some notably courageous exceptions, including 21 members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Rep. Jose Serrano of the Bronx) are posturing as though their support for the bailout of the banks is really a vote for the working class. That is as patently demagogic as is the claim by a band of ultra-right Republicans that their fake opposition to the bailout is based on their deep concern for workers and the poor. Right. If you really wanted to save the homes and jobs of the working class you'd put the money (money which came from the workers in the first place) directly in their hands, and there are a load of ways the government could do this; you wouldn't offer it up to the same larcenous crew that created the crisis.
Anyway, as I thought about this, good old Upton Sinclair popped into my head. In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, the writer most famous for his 1906 novel The Jungle ran for governor of California. He was a socialist and his platform was quite progressive, and he was drawing deep support among the suffering masses of people and well on his way to being elected until the right wing cooked up a red scare smear campaign against him that succeeded in dooming his candidacy. He never gave up, however, in his lifelong devotion to the cause of workers' rights. He wasn't an out and out red but he was pink enough and clear enough about it to be a rarity in the ranks of U.S. arts and letters. He lived a long life and wrote many more books, including the recently reissued Oil!, upon which the atrocious movie There Will Be Blood was supposedly based although it omitted the main thrust of the novel, which was about the oil workers' struggle.
Thinking about Upton Sinclair naturally made me wonder what Chris Bachelder is working on now. His novel U.S.!, in which Sinclair is repeatedly brought back to life to inspire and cheer on present-day fighters for social justice, is a wonderful, wonderful book, one of my all-time favorites. It's hilarious. It's poignant. Most important, it is shot through with hope.
Hope is one of the things I'll be touching on often. It's at the core of red reading and writing, I believe. Unlike so many young writers in this country, even those whose bent is relatively progressive, Bachelder builds fictive worlds where irony and cynicism have no purchase. His is a rare gift. I hope he's cooking up another offering for us to read soon.
Plus, when I emailed him a fan letter after I read U.S.! a couple years ago, he sent me a gracious reply that he signed "your comrade." Now that warms a red reader's heart.
