Chuck Klosterman is a funny guy.  It would probably be pretty fun to hang out with him for one evening in some bar in North Dakota (as far as I can tell, his locale of choice for pounding beers and then getting into a car — his car should bear a large yellow triangular sticker stating “warning: drunk on board”).  An evening during which I would laugh along to his one-liners about television shows, sleazy celebrities, pointless video games, and popular music, and nod and chuckle as he got down into too-long but still funny riffs about the above-named topics.  But he is nothing more than a comedian and when he attempts, as in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, to wax eloquent on popular culture (his self-named “Low Culture Manifesto”), he fails to bring anything new to bear on already thoroughly dissected topics such as the cult of celebrity, reality TV, video games, Pamela Anderson down and dirty on Tommy Lee (enough already), the fading away of journalistic integrity, the search for cool, and Star Wars (sung to the tune of “War: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing”).

He is still funny — occasionally I laughed out loud — in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (by the way, his rambling on about cereals is not funny and was done much better as a undercurrent of humor on Seinfeld) but he is never particularly insightful and rarely intelligent and absolutely never enlightening.  There is never a moment of “wow — I never thought about it that way” but quite a few moments of “Yeah, I remember thinking that same thing when I was wasted” – then I sobered up and realized how stupid it is trying to drag significant conclusions from insignificant events.  One reason Klosterman has no direct hits  — no eureka moments — is because he never commits to focused or pointed remarks: everything he writes is couched in terms of “or you could look at it another way”. There is no commitment in his writing, no risk-taking, no bold statements about anything.

Even Klosterman’s introduction is a cop-out on his part:  he tells us there are two ways to look at life, then he says there are lots of ways to look at things but everything is connected or everything is not connected (so there are two ways to look at things)  and he is going to attack a few topics and maybe they will be important but it doesn’t matter because he’s just trying to figure out why he’s alive. Huh? Klosterman never goes deeper than this, ever, in the whole entire book.  He is a surface skimmer, and a good one.  But good writing requires deeper diving, jumping in and holding your breath and really searching for something more.  Klosterman’s search is limited to the good one-liner.  Or worse: his search for the perfect final sentence.  He strives to be  acutely and cutely clever in his conclusions. I think he is going for the aphorism-of-the-year award or something.  But he fails to write anything remotely along the lines of a classic Oscar Wilde or a David Foster Wallace (not exactly aphorisms , more aphor-paragraphs or footnotes).  Anyway, the perfect aphorism is nothing to shoot for (again and again and again): aphorisms are by and large witty but they are not really interesting.  They do not cause change or movement in how we view anything; they just re-enforce a sneaking suspicion we had about something.

Another weakness of Klosterman as a writer is that he just too obsessed with being cool.  His fear of being un-cool drips from the pages of this book like newly-pubescent sweat.   He is afraid to go beyond the bounds of accepted coolness and so he never becomes really interesting, he never makes new and illustrative connections between low culture and who we are.  Instead he sticks to acceptable and conforming — and strangely self-assuring — diatribes on us as people subjected to the culture, creating the culture, and not fighting the culture.  His essays read like a guide of how to make party talk without pissing off the in-crowd, ’cause you don’t want to be unpopular. Klosterman wants so badly to be popular the way a high school kid wants to be popular, not standing out but blending in; not too out- there, not too dweeby, not too smart or too pretty or too sincere (god forbid).  Just good enough to swim along, have some laughs, be in on the inside jokes, wink wink. I couldn’t care less if something is cool or not; I only care if it is interesting, alive, genuine, and well-written.  Klosterman’s book  fails on all counts.  But he is funny, so I say we chuck the book, name him class clown, and move on.