Chuck Klosterman’s new nonfiction collection explores voyeurism, Garth Brooks, authenticity, and the best reason for time travel. You know, the usual.
Eating the Dinosaur
By Chuck Klosterman
Scribner
It’s safe to say that you’d have to be a die-hard Klosterman fan to follow him down all the blind alleys he explores and through the disparate notions he attempts to connect here. In a piece ostensibly about the critically acclaimed TV show Mad Men, for instance, he reprints a two-page press release from Pepsi, in its entirety, then attempts to say something original about the nature of advertising—but ends up not saying much of anything.
To Klosterman’s loyal fans, he is forever shedding light on “confusing truths” that are “lurking unnoticed” in plain sight. To his detractors, he’s simply performing unnecessary intellectual calisthenics that serve mostly to complicate simple concepts. We lean toward the latter camp. In Dinosaur Klosterman veers so wildly and so frequently from one divergent idea to the next that it quickly becomes tiresome. There are some provocative statements that may make you pause and assess their accuracy, such as, “When Obama or Sarah Palin or Rachel Maddow or Glenn Beck speak, we take for granted that—at the very least—they are partially (and consciously) lying.” Klosterman is on firmer ground when talking sports—offering a well-supported theory that football, that bedrock of conservatism, is actually the most liberal sport we have. But his maddening habit of taking the circuitous route when the straight path will do just fine ultimately undoes him.
