As one would expect from an author who also penned a book called
Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing, Benjamin Nugent’s American
Nerd does acknowledge the hipster nerd appropriation phenomenon so
prevalent in this town and others [see Letters for further
griping on the subject]. The book as a whole, though, is a very
unironic and largely unfashionable attempt to locate the origins of the
archetype. As in, how did the idea of a socially retarded, big
glasses-wearing, short pants-clad social outcast develop and solidify
in the popular imagination?
Nugent dutifully tracks the origins of both the word and the
aesthetic, in a two-part book that first examines the history of the
nerd, and then wraps up with a less-interesting series of case studies
of nerd subcultures. His efforts to pin down the racial elements of the
term are fascinating, if underdeveloped, and he makes an interesting
correlation between the development of the “jock” archetype as a
late-19th century reaction against industrialization, and the
subsequent stigmatization of nerds as “machinelike”:
“The pathos of being a nerd is to feel that because you are
comfortable with rational thought, you are cut off from the experience
of spontaneous feelings, of romance, of nonrational connection to other
people. A nerd is so often self-loathing because he accepts the
thinking/feeling rift, and he knows and cares that other people accept
it, too. To be a nerd is often to live with a nagging feeling of one’s
own incurable heartlessness.”
For all that Nugent is a self-described nerd, though his book lacks
the singularity of focus that he ascribes to the nerdy: The book is
overambitious in its scope, skittering between subjects as disparate as
Freaks and Geeks, the relationship between autism and nerdiness,
anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the 19th century,
Halo gamers, and the Society for Creative Anachronism, all in
224 short pages. One ends up wishing he would develop his ideas more
fully, instead of devoting only short chapters to such wildly divergent
topics. Nugent is a clear, funny, engaging writer, and it’s a testament
to his skills that the biggest complaint about his book is that it just
isn’t long enough.