Review: X by Chuck Klosterman

My history with Chuck Klosterman is a bit hit-or-miss. While I believe I had read a few things by him in early-century Spin, the first time I read something that I knew was by him was when he did a “Curious Guy” email exchange with Bill Simmons in the old days of ESPN.com’s Page 2. Chuck quickly launched into a dictum about how there were two kinds of Gen Xers – those that love the movie Singles (phonies) and those that love Reality Bites (real people). Bill seemed to speak for me and millions of other followers by saying he was a huge fan of Singles. Not the best start.

Even after that fiasco, Klosterman was featured as a writer on Grantland and occasionally The Ringer. His essays were always intriguing and incisive, and often very memorable (we’ll get to that). Based on how much I loved his writing on Grantland, a few years ago I read his novel The Visible Man. It was…unmemorable.

Thinking his specialty may be in nonfiction, I sheepishly read his book But What If We’re Wrong last year. This is a review of his book X, not But What If We’re Wrong, but in summary, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and earns all ten hot dogs. If you want to know more, ask me and I will happily spend a few hours talking about the subjects and learnings he wrote in that book.

Gathering that Klosterman’s nonfiction should be an easy sell for me, I picked up X, a collection of essays and articles he wrote between around 2007-2017. Not surprisingly, I loved it.

In the introduction, Klosterman mentions that his two loves are music and sports, and everything he’s ever written is really about one or both of those subjects. This is despite the fact that the actual subjects of his articles include zombies, a time capsule in Tulsa, and Mountain Dew.

While all of the articles are very good reads, a couple really stand out. The article about the time capsule (a rusty car) unearthed in Tulsa – which he never had a chance to see while he was there – was lighthearted yet reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s famous profile of Roger Federer. The profile of Eddie Van Halen was very enlightening – Klosterman made him seem like a hard-drinking, hard-drugging professional nerd. The article about going inside the Cleveland Brown’s organization coming into the Draft was very enlightening – right up to when he got thrown out of the war room. The standout essay, though, is the one he wrote about his father dying, but with the actual subject being the weird interview Eminem had with Brent Musburger and Kirk Herbstreit on a Saturday Night College Football game. I remember when I first read that essay online years ago, and it was so touching and heartwarming I hadn’t stopped thinking of it since (note: if you can’t reconcile an article about an Eminem interview being “touching” and “heartwarming”, keep in mind that that’s how great a writer Klosterman can be at his best).

Throughout the book, Klosterman added lead-ins to his essays. These can be just as illuminating as the essays themselves, such as how he was picked to write about zombies by the New York Times, or how he now realizes he focused his piece on Gnarls Barkley on the wrong member. For certain dudes of a certain age, the introduction to his first essay will be the big takeaway, as that intro was primarily about what it was like to write for Grantland. As he put it, it was a thrilling experience, but when you’re trying to do what the internet can’t do – ON THE INTERNET – you’re doomed for failure.

There aren’t any real clunkers I can think of, although two essays were merely okay. The album history of KISS seemed to stretch on way too long – although his exuberance shines through, since, as he said in the article, this was his favorite band ever, and he just found out they were going in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The article about creating VORM (Value Over Replacement Member) analytics for bands was a joke taken way too far – although this was clearly a Grantland assignment and was in the best possible hands.

One of the most curious pieces I read was the one about Mountain Dew (and what it could do to the bodies of rats, and what drinking 36-48 ounces of it for three decades would do to the human body, and whether the human in question (Klosterman) should really care). The reason, outside of the premise, that it was so curious was because the title of the essay was “But What if We’re Wrong?” I made me wonder – did a mostly-humorous piece about Mountain Dew spark one of the best books I ever read, or was this just a coincidence?

If you’re going to measure up a collection of essays from a modern writer, you have to compare them to David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. While Klosterman’s X doesn’t really reach those heights (again, except for the Eminem piece), the book is well worth a read. Very recommended: eight out of ten hot dogs.