Review: Raised in Captivity by Chuck Klosterman

As mentioned a few reviews ago, while I’ve loved reading Chuck Klosterman’s nonfiction/essays (But What If We’re Wrong? being one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read), I only read one novel of his, The Visible Man, and found it pretty boring. However, fresh off of reading his wonderful essay collection X, I figured it was time to give the man another chance with fiction. Thus, I picked up his short story collection Raised in Captivity.

For one thing, put the emphasis on “short” – while I was reading these on a Kindle, I can’t imagine any of them being more than 3-5 pages long. You also need to take the emphasis OFF “story”, as many of these are more character sketches or exercises, and lack climaxes/conclusions/actions of any sort.

Another curious thing is the delineation of Klosterman’s essays vs. short stories. Many of Klosterman’s essays are based on “Imagine if….” or “What if….”; with a book full of story snippets, these could easily have been turned into essays.

As an example, at the risk of spoilers (but there’s no real story so there’s nothing to spoil), here is the basic plot to the eponymous story, “Raised in Captivity”:

· A man is flying in first class and goes to use the lavatory

· He opens the door and sees a live puma sitting in there

· Unnerved, he goes back to his seat and tells the guy next to him

· He and the guy next to him spend some time trying to figure out how that could have happened

· Someone else goes to use the bathroom, and the seatmate stops the man from telling her about the puma, saying “We’re all in this together.”

If, instead, Klosterman had titled this work “Trump” and started with “Imagine you are flying first class….”, it would have fit right at home in an essay collection like X. (Update: On Kindle, you don’t get to see the book cover, you just dive into the prose. I just uploaded the cover picture to this review, and noticed the tag at the bottom saying “Fictional Nonfiction”. So…I guess this was on purpose?)

I think all the above can be classified as criticism; however, it’s important to note that none of the above is WRONG. In fact, this is a highly enjoyable book. While it would have been nice to have seen at least a few pieces with actual stories, the pieces are very imaginative (a future history where MIT is a basketball powerhouse, a situation where coins are coming up tails more than heads), with captivating writing – my favorite line, from a piece about millennials, went something like “One man was 45 and the other was 68, so they were the same age.” And if you care for any particular story, there will be another one just a page or two away.

This is a very fun read – again, I feel like Klosterman left a little bit on the table, but what is there is imaginative and fun. Nine out of ten hot dogs.