Bibliofreakblog

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

Are you Gen X?  IF the answer is yes, then you will love this book, and find it hilarious, see yourself mirrored in its image, and pass it on to all of your contemporaries.  If the answer is no, because you were born BEFORE Gen Xers, you might giggle at the humor of the book, but more likely, you will wonder about the future of the country and which of your children have done what drugs.  If you were born AFTER Gen Xers, you will LOL, see the occasional similarity between your own life and culture and theirs, but mostly wonder what the hell Klosterman is talking about and why anyone should care.

My points:

It is a well written, humorous book, but so solipsistic in nature that its appeal is really only geared towards the author’s own generation.

Case in point:

I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as “the sport of the future” since 1977.  Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.  But people continue to tell me that soccer will soon become part of the fabric of this country, and that soccer will eventually be as popular as football, basketball, karate, pinball, smoking, glue sniffing, menstruation, animal cruelty, photocopying, and everything else that fuels the eroticized, hyperkinetic zeitgeist of Americana.

To which I have to say, who sniffs glue any more?  Whip-its, maybe, but sniffing glue?  Please.

O.K., so maybe I’m being pedantic, but still.  This is just one instance of a reoccurring theme.

The first essay in the book discusses the Gen Y-induced Emo genre of music (on behalf of my generation, I apologize for this class of music).  But he seems to not understand what Emo is.  To my mind, Emo is the bastard child of goth kids and ska skaters, who wear black hoodies and whine a lot.  It started with Blink 182 and denigrated from there.

But Klosterman starts talking about Coldplay. If you take Emo to mean emotional, and emotional to mean, as dictionary.com specifies, actuated, effected, or determined by emotion rather than reason or just pertaining to or involving emotion, then sure, you could say that Coldplay is Emo.  But then again, you could say that the Beatles are Emo, too.

Like all modern male writers owing a debt to the likes of Updike, Roth, and Mailer (I’m thinking of Klosterman’s peers such as Eggers and Wallace), there is the mandatory essay on porno.  Klosterman chooses to focuses on internet porn, particularly on porno websites that claim to have pics of naked housewives.  I sat there reading the article, and wondered if he realizes that these aren’t actual housewives.  But then he goes on to discuss nipples, and concludes the article wondering why women don’t watch porn.  

The guy is an idiot.  But he is a funny idiot.

One last note:  I’ve not written in this review about the article entitled “Being Zack Morris” (the main character of the show Saved By the Bell).  This is because soon I’ll be posting an entire deconstruction of said article.  It pissed me off that much.

If you like this book/author, you might like:

Consider the Lobster (CNF) by David Foster Wallace 
Stranger Than Fiction (CNF) by Chuck Palahniuk
The Corrections (F) by Jonathan Franzen
Freakonomics (NF) by  Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (CNF) by Rob Sheffield
Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life (CNF) by John Sellers
Girl (F) by Blake Nelson
The Average American Male (F) by Chad Kultgen
JPod (F) by Douglas Coupland
Generation X (F) by Douglas Coupland
A Work of Staggering Genius (CNF) by Dave Eggers
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (CNF) by Max Tucker
Stuff White People Like (CNF) by Christian Lander
High Fidelity (F) by Nick Hornby
Songbook (F) by Nick Hornby

Other works by Chuck Klosterman:

Downtown Owl (F)
Chuck Klosterman IV (CNF)
Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota (CNF)
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% a True Story (CNF)
Eating the Dinosaur (CNF)