A writer’s Dionysian decade
Chuck Klosterman’s latest is thoughtful and engrossing
As per the titular author’s admission, “Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the 21st Century” is a deceptive read.
At face value, the popular pop culture essayist’s most recent collection of assorted articles from the past 10 years — most of which were previously published in various online and print media outlets, including The New York Times, GQ, Billboard, Esquire, ESPN: The Magazine, The AV Club, The Guardian, SPIN and the sadly now-defunct Grantland, which the writer founded alongside Bill Simmons — is a sprawling, typically long-winded wordy exercise into several miscellaneous musings from a variety of recent time points yet one singular viewpoint.
Yet, in typical Klosterman fashion, to dig deeper is to absorb and ultimately adore the meditative, (more) melancholy, Mountain Dew-fueled madness.
Through his usual self-deprecating, wide-ranging and often highly specific (and sometimes not) style, Mr. Klosterman creates the “worst kind of time machine” — at least, as far as he is concerned — by re-exploring his wild writings on zombies, steroids, the Cleveland Browns, Usain Bolt, Charlie Brown, Tim Tebow, Harry Potter, “Breaking Bad,” the Beatles and more with a more critical eye and an always contemplative soul. It’s a consistently amusing, highly perceptive anthology, one that’s predictably unevenbut never less than informativeand deeply engaging.
A spiritual sequel to 2006’s “Chuck Klosterman IV,” “Chuck Klosterman X” is an omnibus that “equates to a short book about music, a short book about sports and a short book about everything else that could possibly exist.”
And that’s true. Featuring interviews from Taylor Swift, Kobe Bryant, Stephen Malkmus (of the band Pavement), Eddie Van Halen and Gnarls Barkley (along with a very terse phone conversation with Tom Brady), as well as a recounting of the craziest college basketball game ever, a sympathetic evaluation of Nickelback and Creed and 10,000-plus words on KISS and its cultural (and personal) importance, this one is all over the place.
But that adds to the beautiful, exhausting, weird, all-composing fun of it all.
Cheekily subtitled, “Chuck Klosterman X” is intentionally not a defining portrait of the world-atlarge. Rather, it’s an engrossing, journalistic and highly personalized portrait of a maturing, well-established entertainment writer’s look at middle age, changing tides, divergent trends, growing subcultures and blooming sentimentality. It’s the same Klosterman we know and love, but he’s also older, more wistful, more concerning, more complacently unsure and more pessimistic.
But through that honesty, personality, peculiarity, and integrity, Mr. Klosterman carves another finely written, deeply thoughtful tome, one that continues to represent one of our sharpest and most distinctive culture writers working today. Of course, in typical modern writer fashion, Mr. Klosterman would never suggest as much himself.
Some portions of this book find him chalking up his work as everything from an embarrassment to a failure. Though, of course, we beg to differ.
After exploring our vast, unknownuniverse and the possibility that everything we know to be true may, in fact, be incorrect with last year’s curious, often perplexing “But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Past As If It Were the Present,” Mr. Klosterman’s 10th book chooses to explore his known and yet equally unknown self this time around.
And it’s a comforting, bewildering, hilarious, occasionally baffling and wickedly absorbing read in a growingly uncertain world.
“Chuck Klosterman X” is unrestrained, self-reflective, mindfully crafted and wildly entertaining.
It’s also, at times, strangely moving. It’s Mr. Klosterman at his best (and sometimes not). This “collection of nonfiction dreams” may be deceptive in the eye of its writer, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining or enlightening.