The Bookworm: Chuck Klosterman IV

Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas by (you guessed it) Chuck Klosterman. 432 pages. Scribner. 2006.

This is, in fact, the nicest automobile I’ve ever touched; I’ve never even had a dream that included a vehicle like this. Sitting in the passenger seat is like being inside a spaceship. I have just spent the last two hours interviewing Bono about the new U2 album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, their tenth career album and their first release in over four years. He is about to drive me back to the Clarence Hotel in Dublin’s Temple Bar area, a hotel that Bono co-owns with guitarist the Edge (and which includes a restaurant where Bono plans to have supper with an eighty-two-year-old Irish painter.)

I thought of using a different excerpt for the intro quote (I’ll get to it later, though), but I chose that one instead because: (1) I remembered a quirky scene with Bono so it was easy to find, and (2) it illustrates Klosterman’s Gonzo style (or should it be Klonzo style?) approach to pop culture journalism, which is prominently displayed in Chuck Klosterman IV.

Unlike his earlier collection, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, CKIV is mostly a compilation of Klosterman’s previously published essays, interviews, and reviews. From an Akron Beacon Journal article profiling local psychic shops, to a rant on Barry Bonds and baseball’s steroid era for ESPN.com, the pieces in CKIV cover the gamut of Klosterman’s social interests and journalism career while showcasing his witty repartee.

Klosterman is a comical motherfucker. I find it’s funnier to read him knowing what he looks like:


Now that’s a music journalist. Klosterman’s a big KISS fan. Anyone who likes KISS can’t be taken seriously, so it’s a beneficial coincidence he’s naturally humorous. He strikes me as the kind of guy who would jokingly, not pretentiously, make reference to obscure bands and musicians in every conversation.

This is the second time I’ve read Klosterman. I like his stuff a lot, but I couldn’t help questioning the motives behind CKIV. It contains good material, and almost every piece is interesting, but to me the book is not a piece of art: it’s advertising. It’s the publisher’s attempt to cash in on Klosterman’s building success and market him for their benefit. It’s like somebody at Scribner said, “Now that he’s well known we should collect as many of the obscure and unread articles he’s written in the past as we can and put them in a book.” Two-thirds of CKIV consists of Klosterman’s Esquire columns and interviews he did for SPIN. Another quarter are essays and stories that I suspect were never published (like the same genius at Scribner also called Klosterman and said, “Hey, Chuck. You got anything else we can use?”). I always thought all-encompassing collections were reserved for the likes of Borges, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but apparently Klosterman has soared into the rare air of literary greatness. According to the review excerpts on the back cover, he’s “like the new Hunter S. Thompson,” “the James Bond of pop-culture journalists,” “Gulliver among the cult-crit Lilliputians,” “the Lawrence Welk of pop culture,” “like pop culture’s version of Michael Moore,” and “John Ruskin for the Sid and Marty Krofft Generation.”

Anyone deserving a reference to Sid and Marty Krofft deserves to have their obscure work collected and republished.

Despite the hefty size, CKIV is the easiest 400+ pages I’ve ever read. (Truth be told, 15 pages are dedicated to a glossary, and another 14 are used by an excerpt from his novel, Downtown Owl. Interestingly, the same excerpt appeared at the end of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.) Klosterman prefaces each piece with either a recollection of the reporting or writing process or an elaborate hypothetical question that somehow relates to the article.

I think Scribner gave Klosterman free reign over what to include. I say that because the last piece is an unfinished novel he worked on while in Akron. Klosterman must be the luckiest writer to have ever lived: who else has published an unfinished novel? Regardless, it was a trip. It’s an unfocused but hilarious semi-autobiographical first-person narrative about a journalist in Akron. The main character, Jack, smokes angel dust three mornings a week just before walking into the newsroom. In the intro, Klosterman swears Jack is only partially based on himself, but admits to having smoked angel dust twice by accident. (My props to him, as he’s very candid about his love for the herb.) The excerpt I planned to use came from this unfinished novel, and I want to include it for comedic posterity:

Donna slides down onto the floor and unzips my jeans, pulling them down around my thighs. She wordlessly delivers a totally unnecessary hand job that takes much too long, mostly because I’m much too wasted. When I finally cum, she wipes her paw on the carpet beneath the futon and takes a quick swig of beer; I lay on my back like a stupefied walrus and cough.

Precious. Klosterman had me laughing out loud on the bus once again.

New words I learned: All descriptions courtesy of my MacBook dictionary. Trenchant: “vigorous or incisive in expression or style.” Guileless: “devoid of guile; innocent and without deception.” Ungulate: “a hoofed mammal.” Androgynous: “partly male and partly female in appearance; of indeterminate sex.” Eponymous: “(of a person) giving their name to something.” Lugubrious: “looking or sounding sad and dismal.” Messianic: “of or relating to the Messiah.” Dovetail: “a joint formed by one or more tapered projections (tenons) on one piece that interlock with corresponding notches or recesses (mortises) in another.” Anachronistic: “derivative of anachronism: a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, esp. a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned.” Solipsistically: “derivative of solipsism: the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.” Gambit: “(in chess) an opening in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically of a pawn, for the sake of some compensating advantage.” Sabermetrics: “the application of statistical analysis to baseball records, esp. in order to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players.” Byzantine: as used it means “(of a system or situation) excessively complicated, typically involving a great deal of administrative detail.” Iconoclast: “a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions.” Sycophant: “a person who acts obsequiously toward someone in order to gain advantage; a servile flatterer.” Mendacity: “untruthfulness.” Doppelgänger: “an apparition or double of a living person.” Agoraphobic: “derivative of agoraphobia: extreme or irrational fear of crowded spaces or enclosed public places.” Rhapsodic: “an effusively enthusiastic or ecstatic expression of feeling.”