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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Wildly praised and pathologically reviled, the writer who built a career on pop-cultural essays explains why he has written a novel about small-town America.
By Sarah Hepola
Read more: Fiction, Books, Music, Pop Culture, Interviews, Authors, Novels, Books Interviews, Sarah Hepola
Chuck Klosterman
Sept. 24, 2008 | Chuck Klosterman is, in nearly every way, exactly as I expected him to be. A precociously talented writer who came out of nowhere in 2001 with "Fargo Rock City," an oddball memoir about growing up listening to heavy metal in North Dakota, Klosterman quickly went from working for the daily in Akron, Ohio, to penning compulsively readable celebrity profiles for New York's glossiest magazines. In just six years, he has produced two memoirs (in addition to "Fargo Rock City," there was also the 2005 memoir "Killing Yourself to Live"), two essay collections of deeply populist criticism (2003's "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" and 2006's "Chuck Klosterman IV") and a novel, "Downtown Owl," published this month. During the years of 2005-06 alone, he juggled three columns at once -- for Spin, ESPN and Esquire, tackling topics ranging from the collapse of the American farm to the weirdness of American celebrity.
For this, he has been both wildly overpraised (People magazine called him "the new Hunter Thompson") and almost pathologically reviled. An infamous New York Press takedown of Klosterman, following the publication of "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs," was the media world equivalent of a hissy fit: "I have found the metaphor for everything vile in my generation, and its name is Chuck Klosterman," wrote Mark Ames, his professional jealousy seething from the page. He continued, "Klosterman is, quite simply and almost literally, an ass. His soft, saggy face bears a disturbing resemblance to a 50-year-old man's failing, hairless back end."
For those of us who toil in the trenches of alt-journalism, music blogs or the velvet coffins of midtown Manhattan glossy magazines, there was something both heroic and demonic about Klosterman's meteoric rise. For old-school music critics, he appeared glib, his fame unearned. For those of us who suspiciously eyed the hallowed world of cultural criticism as insular, elitist and frustratingly cold -- and I stand firmly in this camp -- Klosterman (like Dave Eggers before him) was a thrilling antihero, someone who talked more about Billy Joel than Sonic Youth, more about "Star Wars" than Godard. He was not Greil Marcus -- scholar, aesthete, historian. He was a state-schooler from North Dakota who chugged beer, wrote fantastic prose about his romantic misdeeds as related to his favorite music and movies and TV shows, and somehow struck gold. He was just like us -- except for the fame, money and accolades, which also created a twisted kind of resentment even among his fans, because if he was so goddamn much like us, well, then, why weren't we him?
So, it is not surprising that, even before I met him, I felt that I already knew him. He was like so many 30-something male critics I have worked with over the years -- the nerd disguised as hipster, with his scruffy beard and clunky black frames and thrift-store clothes, the guy who knows sports stats as fluently as he knows KISS albums and episodes of "Saved by the Bell." And so what I found most interesting about Chuck Klosterman, when we met at an East Village bar one afternoon, was not the things I expected -- the deliciously skewed observations, the playful combativeness, the way he thumps out the drum line of a song he likes on the side of his arm -- it's what I did not expect. His height, for instance (I would guesstimate it at 6-foot-2). The way that, for someone whose calling card is his relatability, he seems kind of hard to know. Like, emotionally detached. When he leaves to go to the bathroom, he does not say anything -- just gets up from his bar stool, comes back, and picks up where he left off. Like, when I ask whom he's dating, he says, "a writer," and stonewalls. This from the guy who wrote a memoir, "Killing Yourself to Live," that perseverated on his entanglements with the opposite sex.
But Chuck Klosterman seems to be getting a little sick of Chuck Klosterman. Even his most distinguishing quality -- his ability to ramble endlessly, but meaningfully, about the ephemera of American culture -- is wearing on him these days. In his September 2008 column for Esquire, he writes, "I find myself growing more and more depressed about all the things I used to love ... It's not difficult to be the cop in the car watching the meth lab, but you will drive yourself sad. You'll find yourself thinking, Maybe the meth lab will blow up ... But it doesn't blow up. It just sits there, falling apart and declining in value, while the people inside lose their teeth and get crazy high."
He's no longer going to be writing his Esquire column, by the way.
"AC/DC did the same album over and over again," he says at one point, "and I love AC/DC, but I don't want to be Angus Young. I want to be Jeff Tweedy." As every 30-something nerd-disguised-as-hipster knows, Jeff Tweedy is the much-adored frontman for Wilco, a gifted singer-songwriter who could have spent a (lucrative) career crafting perfect three-minute pop songs but decided to dissect them instead, upending (if only temporarily) his own career with the controversial and brilliant 2002 album, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."
And Klosterman, a man who built his career on dazzling, antic nonfiction, has also done something unexpected. (And yet, at the same time, totally clichéd.) He has written a novel. A novel that is quite good, actually. Not overeager or hyperambitious, but a slow burn of a small-town snapshot that is more "Winesburg, Ohio" than Amy Winehouse, more "Last Picture Show" than "Rocky Horror Picture Show."
Do not misunderstand. This book is still obviously written by Klosterman. As beautifully as he evokes these characters, there are moments when Klosterman can't help being "Klosterman," sometimes to incongruous results. In a passage about a Catholic priest, he writes, "his vocal style employed the soft-loud-soft pattern that would eventually be perfected by rock bands like the Pixies." But more often, his trademark flourishes are funny, charming. They seem part of the fabric of these characters' lives. Julia, a high school English teacher and secret stoner, muses to herself in the depths of a mellow buzz that the world can be split into two kinds of people: "People who said, 'This joint is cashed,' and people who always said, 'Well, let me try.' Julia placed herself to be in the second category, although she wondered if that made her an optimist or a pothead."
"Downtown Owl" follows a cast of likable but doomed characters over the course of nine months in 1984 in the fictional town of Owl, N.D. Their stories unfold with sympathy and a careful eye for the rich peculiarities of small-town American life. "They had been drinking for seven hours," he writes. "Ted was trying to drive off his buzz." It is, at times, laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also poignant and sad. In one of the novel's best set pieces, a widower named Horace recalls the death of his wife, Alma, wracked by a hyper-rare sleep disorder that sent her into a state of hallucinatory psychosis and desperation. "That night, Alma screamed at the television. She thought it was a panda bear."
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