'The Bear Went Over the Mountain' in Retrospect

The Bear Went Over the Mountain is not a complicated story. An author loses his way, slinks into the woods with his dog, buries his latest manuscript, and finds himself out amongst nature. Meanwhile, a bear digs up the manuscript, decides it must be very important, takes it to the big city, and finds himself a critically acclaimed author amongst humankind.

The Bear Went Over the Mountain is not a complicated story. It is an absurd story, and the fact that it never once recognizes itself as such is precisely what makes it one of the most impactful pieces of literature I have been lucky enough to glean for myself. Upon finishing it for the first time, I spent days replaying individual chapters and scenes, discovering new layers in the way they spoke to me with each examination. In unraveling the depth of the text over and over again, I achieve minor yet meaningful moments of personal clarity, and all because The Bear Went Over the Mountain makes a point of never dwelling on anything as abjectly absurd when it could instead focus on the things that matter.

And that seems to be the author's whole thing for the most part.

William Kotzwinkle is an interesting person. As such, he tends to write interesting novels. Unsurprisingly, Kotzwinkle is best known for his novelization of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and its sequel novel, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet, the latter of which is often fondly remembered as a case study in pop culture absurdity. While it is that absurdity that makes The Book of the Green Planet so memorable, it is also the common vein that runs through nearly all of Kotzwinkle's works. The Fan Man is a personal favorite of mine. Though it didn't hit quite as hard as The Bear Went Over the Mountain, it stood out even more so for its absurdity and the way that it embraced that as a defining feature with every turn of the page. At the same time, The Fan Man and The Book of the Green Planet are very much aware of their own absurdity, whereas The Bear Went Over the Mountain simply doesn't worry about what may or may not be believable.

The Book of the Green Planet is obvious science fiction, and The Fan Man follows a man whose life is a pastiche of hippy and beatnik stereotypes, but The Bear Went Over the Mountain simply is. It's a story about a writer and a bear. Or about two writers, if you read it that way. Or maybe it's about a writer and a dog, or even just the dog if that turns out to be the chapter that you read and reread incessantly as I did. No matter what it ends up being about to any given reader, however, The Bear Went Over the Mountain is never going to leave someone thinking that anything that happened in it couldn't happen to them, because none of it is really that absurd at all. Sure, no one has ever actually uncovered the Next Great American Novel buried deep in the wilderness, but The Bear Went Over the Mountain has a way of making readers wonder if that's only because they haven't gone digging for it yet.