In 2003, after
Chuck Klosterman published a collection of
pop-culture essays called
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa
Puffs, Mark Ames, a
New York Press book reviewer,
wrote the following: "I have found the metaphor for everything vile
in my generation, and its name is Chuck Klosterman." The review
goes on to call Klosterman the Antichrist and suggests he should be
"rotting in a death camp." It's a fascinating review. Really. You
should
Google it.
At the time I read this weird evisceration, I was not too familiar
with Chuck Klosterman. I knew he was a successful journalist who
wrote funny, quirky essays about
The Real World and
Saved by the Bell. As a less-successful journalist (who
watched those shows but never bothered to string together two
sentences about them), I didn't mind the suggestion that he was an
overhyped fraud; it's best to keep the talent bar out there pretty
low. Since then, Klosterman has gone on to even greater fame: He
writes popular columns for
Esquire and
ESPN the
Magazine and, until recently,
Spin. Last year, he
published
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story,
in which he traveled across
America in a
Ford Taurus, visiting
famous rock-star death sites. And now comes an anthology of his
previously published work called
Chuck Klosterman IV. Get
it? Kinda like
Led Zeppelin IV. If you didn't hate him
already, well, now you can.
Except that if you've actually read Chuck Klosterman, chances are
you don't hate him. (If you're a
New York Press book
critic, all bets are off.) Chances are you find him to be likable
and funny, a rather ingenious interpreter of lowbrow America.
Unlike, say, David Foster Wallace, who can turn a story about game
shows into some head-crunching master class on the human condition,
Klosterman comes off less professorial or smug and more like the
chatty guy standing near the keg with hundreds of theories about
Smurfs and
Michael Jackson. Is he right? Does it matter?
Well, maybe, although when I read his books (including the charming
hair-metal memoir
Fargo Rock City), I marvel at how often
he articulates exactly how I feel about something even before I
can, whether it be his clearheaded defense of
Billy Joel or his
observation upon visiting Graceland: "Twenty million Elvis fans
can, in fact, be wrong." Even if I disagree with him, he generally
persuades me to play along. Is this because I lack a strong moral
center? Probably. But it's also because his stories are so fiercely
observed and hilarious that, quite frankly, I don't really
mind if he's just tossing out ideas.
For some people, Klosterman's pop-cultural hyperlinking can feel
exhausting, if not cheap and superficial. But the fact is that many
people, millions and millions of people, understand and talk about
themselves through the vocabulary of television, music, video
games, and sports. Klosterman just happens to be better at this
than nearly anyone else. For him, the point is rarely whether or
not he likes a piece of art in an easily definable way - thumbs-up
or thumbs-down, rate this on a scale of one to four stars. The
point is how that piece of ephemera helps make sense of his own
life and, by extension, ours.
In
Killing Yourself to Live, as he wanders from accidental
drowning to plane crash to club fire, he spends much of the time
ruminating about three failed romances. At one point, he argues
that each of his exes represents a different member of
Kiss. It's
navel-gazing to the point of absurdity, but it's also a fairly
accurate portrait of the obsessive American male.
His new book,
Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People
and Dangerous Ideas (Scribner, $25), is a compendium of
celebrity profiles, personal essays, and assorted features he's
written over the course of his career, first at newspapers in
Fargo,
North Dakota, and Akron,
Ohio, and later at New York
glossies. Such a massive compilation of jaunty observations about
Morrissey and
Britney Spears makes you wonder: Isn't this
generational celebration of trash culture somehow dangerous? And
that's a good question. Just wait till this episode of
Real
World/Road Rules Challenge ends, and I'll get back to you.