In Praise Of My Boy

I know that I am a combination baseball/music/movie/jeans/beer elitist. And for years, I wished I could be a literary elitist.

I wished I could sit in in an advanced graduate course at Harvard and discuss A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and The Sound and The Fury. But I just never could.

One, because I have never read those books and two, because, if I did, I likely wouldn't get them.

And so for a long time, I had this literature envy. I'm not really sure why though because most of the young English teachers I've met (loyal readers not included!) are pretentious tools who probably became English teachers to feel important because they didn't date anyone while in high school (is that why I want to be an English teacher?)

But, after years of therapy, I think I'm done with literature envy. And that's why I can say with the utmost confidence that Chuck Klosterman is beyond awesome.

Those in the literature know would likely poo-poo my boy Chuck because he is A) Not turn of the century and B) Not British.

But there are few contemporary writers like him. While most book snobs wax poetic about dead novelists ("Pushkin so pumps my nads!"), you can still be accepted into the elite world of literature geekdom if you namea living author like Philip Roth or Cormac (Cor-MACK for you uncouth) McCarthy as one of your favorites. But if you drop the names Nick Hornby, Jane Green, or Stephen King at a coffee shop in Cambridge, you just might be shot.

But I am afraid no more. I have no problem admitting that I love "She Drives Me Crazy" and Love Actually, so why shouldn't I admit that my favorite author is a guy who writes essays about Zach Morris and Lloyd Dobler?

My favorite author is Chuck Klosterman and the man is nothing short of genuis.

Recently, I concluded Downtown Owl, his first work of fiction. For the second time. And some days later, I am still wondering how Mitch's little sister is doing and what she might be up to all these years later. I'm wondering if Laidlaw ever got bagged and I want to know if Horace ever forgave himself. I can't say I ever wonder or care what happened to any of the Joads though. And I definitely don't give a flying fuck if Ethan Frome ever got out of his funk or what the hell happened to Pip.

Anytime a writer (song writer, screen writer, author) makes you care about their MADE UP characters, then they have done something right, no? But what also makes Klosterman so amazing is his combination of supremely intelligent wit and total lack of pretentiousness. Like a Family Guy episode, Klosterman makes references that you must be "in the know" to get. But weirdly, they never seem insulting or misplaced. The jokes never run too long or need explaination. Some of this probably has something to do with the fact that the two of us may share brain cells (I really think he'd like me if he met me), but I miss plenty of his references and jokes (he likes 80s hard rock far more than I do). But unlike a Zach Braff witty pop culture reference or a Jim from The Office movie reference, these jokes are always just a wee bit funnier, just a wee bit smarter, and just a whole bit less unforced. As I said, nothing he writes seems out of place, or random. Where people like Zach Braff and Wes Anderson have funny (to them) little vignettes that they like to just randomly throw in to their stories, Klosterman always has an actual story that just happens to have a whole bunch of really funny vignettes thrown into it. That to me is the correct way to create funny.

Chuck is like a combination of unbelievable storytellers. He is the greatest of your story telling pals all rolled into one. He's your drunken Irish uncle, that friend who backpacked by himself through Europe pre email, blog, cell phones, or digital cameras. He's the crazy college guy who was there for seven years (his name was Luds for me), and that guy who frequents the casual encounters list on craigslist. He's got all the great stories. Only he's smarter than than all those story tellers and far more believable. Oh yeah, he's a way better writer than them too.

But Downtown Owl showed that he's more than just a good storyteller with vast knowledge of L.A. Guns albums and a keen eye for the cultural impact of Empire Strikes Back. With his first novel, Chuck shows that he can craft great characters with challenges, strengths, and worries that we can all relate to.

Without giving anything away (but if you like to go in fresh, skip this paragraph), Owl is set in late 1983 and spans just a few months. My boy introduces us to a group of different people living in a tiny town in North Dakota where everyone knows everyone elses business. These people do not know each other personally, but they still know one another via rumor or gossip. And they are all linked by the town they live in and the personal demons and challenges they face.

Klosterman does nothing new, but great writing doesn't always have to do something new. And critics have raised that the book doesn't really have a traditional plot. They are right. It doesn't.

But somehow, Klosterman gets you invested in the characters while also being hilarious (his take on what the twenty students are thinking about during a teacher's interesting lecture is absolutely dead on). He also does something else. He manages to be a guy (shocking revelation) who writes something really funny without having dick jokes, sex jokes, fart jokes, masturbation jokes, or any of the other jokes that males seem to write today. He also didn't write a self help book, a horror story, a legal thriller, a non-fiction piece on the Battle of The Bulge, a book about the 1959 Indiana basketball team, or an inspirational story about who you meet in heaven.

Basically, he wrote an original, funny story that a man hasn't been able to write since Nick Hornby.

Is Klosterman Nick Hornby? No. But I heard one time (in a rejection letter actually) that 87% of all fiction is read by females and thus, a work of fiction by a male author better not be about males, and if it is, it better be about males hunting serial killers.

And so in a day and age where the publishing industry is taking an absolute beating, it's nice to know that there is real talent out there. But more importantly, I hope people realize that there are male writers out there who can write about something other than the Cold War, the 2004 Red Sox, and detectives.

Because there is. His name is Chuck Klosterman.

Read him. And when some stuffwhitepeoplelike white person dumps on your for reading Chuck instead of Kafka, tell them that Chuck's intelligence, humor, and self reflection will bitch slap their pretentiousness anytime.

You rock Chuck.