Who would win in a fight between a bear and a shark?" is the central question posed in Bear v. Shark: The Novel, but author Chris Bachelder seems more intent on addressing, "What would happen if David Foster Wallace, Donald Barthelme, and Don DeLillo matched wits on a road-movie script about America's cartoonish cultural decline?" The answer is a breathlessly energetic, formally restless debut novel that teeters beneath the weight of its own comic bleakness. The story follows the Normans, a family ripped almost wholesale from DeLillo's White Noise, as they travel to Las Vegas to witness "Bear v. Shark," a spectacle that has all of America rapt. In clipped chapters that rarely exceed two pages, Bachelder adopts the speech of hapless pop-cultural casualties, tireless pundits, and dubiously appointed experts as they debate the merits of bears and sharks in an interspecies battle. Bachelder has a field day with his caricature of America, riffing on billboards reading "Jesus loves the Truth and hates litter" and consumerist hokum like a breakfast cereal consisting of "chocolate waffle bears, chewy caramel sharks, and little marshmallows in the shapes of lawyers, guns, and money." His absurdist leanings fall flat, however, in occasionally overbearing images of suburban homes outfitted with painted lawns and electronic birds chirping in imitation dogwoods. Bachelder is also big on authorial asides, à la Dave Eggers, in which he addresses his admittedly dreary worldview and talks about his unfinished doctoral work in rhetoric at a "mid-tier" school. In spite of his excesses, Bachelder is an engaging stylist whose knack for description suggests a tenderness not fully displayed in Bear v. Shark's thinly drawn characters. As they travel through a hijinks-intensive plot, the Normans serve mostly as stand-ins for their creator's dexterity with dialogue, and Mr. Norman's brooding nature, the book's lone stab at emotional resonance, reads almost like an afterthought. Bachelder sprinkles his narrative with allusions to Wallace's Infinite Jest, but unlike Wallace, fails to address what it's like to be an actual human being among the ruins of a cultural and spiritual wasteland. In spite of this omission, Bear v. Shark is still a funny, sometimes hearteningly insightful book by an author whose beaconing promise could benefit from a little less flash.