So it was when I recently read Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself in Order to Live, his... travelogue, I guess?... about driving around America to places where various rockstars had met their makers, Duane Allman in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Jeff Buckley on an ill-advised swim in Memphis, half of Lynyrd Skynyrd falling to earth in the Mississippi woods, Kurt Cobain by suicide... OR WAS IT?!... on Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle, and the rest.
The deaths are incidental -- in fact, it's pretty fucking shoddy as a framing narrative for a ramble about his cultural obsessions and his fading youth and a series of very self-consciously ill-advised relationships with women he puts on pedestals.
When I was in college, Chuck Klosterman's star was much higher. Back in the halcyon days of warbly, Bush-era new sincerity, as the slacker generation failed to reckon with the fanged horrors of the dawning 21st Century (see attached documents: the film The Station Agent, the discography of Death Cab for Cutie), his self-described "low-culture manifesto" and landmark essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was a major cultural set-piece, to the point where if I was a filmmaker setting a movie in 2002, I would use a copy of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs as a linchpin in the male and female leads' meet-cute.
So what is it? Aside from being the most goddamn Gen-X a title as one can imagine (and while we're talking about Gen-X markers, he is of the youngest possible age to still call weed "pot"), it is a series of essays about Star Wars, the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, The Sims, and shit like that. In other words, it's the same cultural perspective as the aimless conversations in Clerks. This style reached its most refined and mind-expanding form in the essays of David Foster Wallace, and its most egregious and twee form in the oeuvre of Dave Eggers. The Cocoa Puffs book is somewhere in between. In fact, I remember being charmed at points as a 20 year old, even if I did kind of envision Klosterman giggling to himself through his oblong black plastic glasses as he typed out his missives in the cold glow of his laptop.
And so it was when I read Killing Yourself in Order to Live, although the moments of charmedness were far sparser. The more I read, the more annoyed I became at someone who was very aware of the fact that he was being called "self-indulgent" or "masturbatory," and who would inevitably address the self-indulgence of his own self-indulgence and metaphorical or literal masturbation in an infinite series of recursive backflips, all ending in some elaborate analogy to the cover art for Appetite for Destruction or the always-a-bridesmaid status of the Jim Kelly-era Buffalo Bills.
Perhaps this is a difference of age. Perhaps it's the fact that when I first read Klosterman, I was in my early 20s, and far more easily wowed by pyrotechnical meta-melanges than I am now. After all, I was doing a lot of questioning of grand narratives back then, and metashit seemed to be at least an honest answer for how to create art in the era of late-stage capitalism. And while Klosterman seemed to be... well, a dork... he at least had a wit about him and the sort of goofy charm that I always associate with people raised in the painfully earnest Upper Midwest.
Perhaps it's that I am now, at 34, the aimless metropolitan fast approaching middle age that Klosterman embodied. Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago about fading youth and ill-advised relationships? Yep. That was once a lifestyle I looked up to. Now that I seem to be in that whirlwind, I have little use for a guy who seems to be even worse at navigating that than I am. And maybe it's the fact that I didn't grow up an end-of-history Gen-X'er, but retreating into an infinite mirror maze of self-reference, repetition, and simulacrum doesn't seem a valid option anymore (nor does any kind of mealymouthed sincerity, but that's a conversation for a different day).
But here's the weird thing, and one that remarkably few people seem aware of -- Klosterman is capable of so much more. I would strongly advise picking up his debut novel, Downtown Owl, the story of a few people living in a small North Dakota town in the early '80s, which is nothing like his essays. Sure, there are plenty of pop culture references, and I'm remembering the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup providing a major plot point, but they are by no means front and center. Instead, it's a chilly, sparse novel of human yearning, centered around the intersecting lives of a high school football player, an old curmudgeon at the diner, and a recently transplanted schoolteacher, with more in common with the dead-dream landscapes of The Last Picture Show or the stories of Sherwood Anderson or Raymond Carver than the Tarantinized ennui of the man's nonfiction.
So is there hope for his work?
He's since gone on to publish sets of cards in black Helvetica on a white background, making them look an awful lot like Cards Against Humanity, the funny-the-first-time-you-play game which bills itself as the "card game for awful people" but which is in reality the "card game for giggly pudgy edgelords."
The use of Helvetica is telling -- it would have been a standard choice a decade or so ago, and it made its appearance on every sign on Seattle's Capitol Hill when I traipsed her streets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but has since ceased to be the typography of choice for the literary caste.
And so I'm convinced that Klosterman's essays slot in along with the first two Shins albums -- a reminder of a time and place, not without its charms, but something I can comfortably move on from.
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