IT’S GOOD TO HAVE Chuck Klosterman back doing what he
does best: taking pop culture seriously and writing his ass off about
it. His last book, Downtown Owl, was a good novel and a nice
change of pace, but in Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman once
again zeroes in on disposable culture—and in doing so, points out
everything indispensable about it.
Dinosaur contains some of Klosterman’s best work, but it’s
also his most uneven book so far. After a clever opening—in which
the journalist-turned-famed-author interviews documentarian Errol
Morris and This American Life‘s Ira Glass about… well,
interviewing and being interviewed—Dinosaur drags. It’s
interesting but never engrossing to hear Klosterman talk about Garth
Brooks/Chris Gaines; it’s a stretch to see him link Kurt Cobain and
David Koresh; and his thoughts on The Real World, Rear
Window, and daily voyeurism are solid but unsurprising. (By the
time he’s talking about college football, he openly admits he might be
boring some readers. “Non-football followers who are nonetheless
reading this essay out of literary obligation, mild interest, or sheer
boredom: You might want to consider skipping most of the next section,”
he advises.)
Throughout, though, Klosterman offers his usual prickly one-liners
(my favorites from Dinosaur: “If Britney Spears were paid $1
every time a self-loathing stranger used her as a surrogate for his own
failure, she would outearn Warren Buffett in three months,” and “The
degree to which anyone values the internet is proportional to how
valuable the internet makes that person”), as well as ample evidence
that he may be distressingly obsessed with Lost.
Thankfully, Dinosaur ends with four essays that’re fucking
fantastic. In one, Klosterman convincingly argues that the laugh track
is “the most fucked-up media construction spawned by the 20th century.”
In another, he uses Mad Men and a Pepsi press release to delve
into our symbiotic relationship with advertising. Then the works and
words of Rivers Cuomo, Ralph Nader, and Werner Herzog are invoked in
the names of irony, art, and politics. In the book’s final essay, he
wrestles with the Unabomber’s surprisingly coherent anti-technology
screed from 1995. These essays are Klosterman at his best: witty,
smart, surprising, convincing. They’re proof of how
entertaining—and valuable—Klosterman’s low-culture
manifestos can be.
