Just Asking. . . Chuck Klosterman

I didn’t figure out how to pronounce Chuck Klosterman’s name until I got his answering machine. “You’ve reached Chuck Klose-ter-man.” Not Klah-ster-man. All these years and I just assumed the flatter, more nasal, more Midwestern pronunciation. After all, Klosterman, thrity-six, reps the Upper Midwest harder than any other writer of his generation. He graduated from the University of North Dakota and wrote for The Fargo Forum; he then made a stop in Ohio with the Akron Beacon Journal before hitting it big at Spin. He lives in New York now and is the bestselling author of the seminal pop-crit digest Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and is a busy magazine journalist for Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.

Klosterman has found his place as an underclassman in the Wallace/Eggers/Lethem school of post-modernism, and he has all the right moves: an ironic, intellectual perspective on American culture combined with a jocular mastery of both the parenthetical clause and the footnote. But from the beginning, Chuck’s been a po-mo populist: his first book, Fargo Rock City, was a treatise on growing up heavy metal in North Dakota, and some of the best stuff he’s written has been on good ol’ football and basketball, both in the Times’s PLAY and ESPN the Magazine.

And now, perhaps working backwards a bit, Klosterman has written his first novel. Some part of him must understand the hazards of abandoning the relative safety of non-fiction (see Thompson, Hunter), because his new book, Downtown Owl, finds him returning to familiar ground, rural North Dakota.

Will this book tour be any different? Are you more or less comfortable talking about things that are less true?
Well, I don’t know. I never considered it, I guess. I wonder if the questions coming from the audience will be different. I don’t know. I bet they will probably be more of the same. Somebody will of course ask, “Why do a fiction book?” I mean, I’ve been asked that probably twenty-five times in the last week. But then I think people will go back to questions they always ask me, like, “what’s the third-best Black Sabbath record?” {laughs} You know, “how do you think Zach Morris was doing at college?” You know, shit like that.

You subtitled your second memoir, Killing Yourself to Live, as “85 percent of a true story.”
Yeah, well here’s the deal: It’s confusing. Technically, if you read that in the most grammatically accurate terms, what it would seem to indicate is that there is still 15 percent of the story that hasn’t been told.

Right, but there’s a chance people take it to mean: 85 percent true.
Well, in retrospect, it was a great choice after what happened to James Frey. At that time, I still totally defined myself as being a newspaper journalist. I thought, well, I didn’t tape record these conversations—I’m reconstructing the quotes, and I’m reconstructing the dialogue. Plus, I wanted to change the appearance and the names of the women so that somebody who only knew them casually would have no idea who they were. That’s the 15 percent that’s fake.

What percentage of a true story is Downtown Owl? How realistic is Owl compared to, say, Wyndmere, where you grew up?
Well, it’s more of a composite of not just Wyndmere but pretty much all the small towns from all the friends I met at college. It’s sort of a synthesis of the cities that we talked about the most—towns like Napoleon, Langdon, Munich, Thompson, Cando, Larimore, cities like that. So, it’s just like all of them, sort of. Owl, the town that I made up, is bigger than Wyndmere—we didn’t have a movie theater; we didn’t have a bowling alley; we had fewer bars. And the people are all made up. So I suppose that if somebody did a physical construction of the fictional town in my book, it would probably look like Wyndmere, but it would also look like sixty other towns nearby.

But there is so much stuff that is true. For instance, Karen Carpenter actually did die on February 4th, 1983. The Pro Bowl was played on January 29th, 1984.
Yes, I appreciate your research on this. Basically, I started with the blizzard [of 1984], which is a real event, and the Gordan Kahl shooting which is a real event—then I came up with scenarios. But I was really, really obsessed with making sure every detail that happens indirectly to the characters, in the world at large, was true.

Yeah, it reminded me of Ragtime. Did you ever read that book?
No, but I know what book you’re talking about. The thing is for me, the thing that knocks my suspension of disbelief away the most—that erodes it the most—is when somebody has a detail wrong. I’ll actually give a writer much more freedom with narratives and characters—to come up with things that might seem implausible—but if the details are wrong, it immediately takes me out of the story. For example, at one point, I had the people in the bar and the jukebox is playing, and the Billy Joel song “The Longest Time” initially was playing. But then I went back, and I realized that that song wasn’t released as a single until several months later, so I had to change it to “Tell Her About It." Now, stuff like that might seem crazy, granted, but obviously some people are going to check if the Pro Bowl actually happened that day.

Right, exactly, some people are crazier than you.

{laughs}

So did you put a big chart on the wall? How did you decide on doing 1983-'84? The blizzard?
Yeah, the blizzard was the first thing. That was the initial starting point. I wanted the book to sort of come to an epic conclusion with that specific blizzard, which I have a very specific memory of. I wanted to talk about Gordon Kahl, which I knew had happened a year earlier. I will say, it’s much easier to research something like this now because ten years ago, finding the specific date of the Pro Bowl from the past would have been hard, but now it's pretty easy to do. But here’s the deal, because it’s much easier for the writer, it’s also much easier for the reader. I mean, I know people are going to go back and do exactly what you did. Anytime you write about details that people will vaguely remember; I mean I was eleven in 1983. You were what?

Ahh, six or seven?
There’s still going to be things like the Grenada invasion, or whatever, that you’re going to sort of remember hearing about, and they’re going to want to see did he just throw that in there, or did that happen? That’s one part of the book I admit I’m pretty happy about, and I’ll be disappointed if it turns out I fucked up. But I feel like the one thing I got right is that I did get the extraneous details correct.

Which character did you relate to the most? The seventeen-year-old quarterback, the twenty-three-year-old history teacher, or the seventy-three-year-old semi-retired farmer?
The seventy-three-year-old man.

That’s interesting. How did you get into a seventy-three-year-old’s head? Did you just drink a lot of mediocre coffee and read a lot of WWII spy novels?
I just imagined what it’s like to be old. I feel old as it is. My whole life, I’ve always related to much older people than to people my own age. I don’t know why, I just have. I guess, to be a little more accurate, all of the characters are me in a way. I made 'em all up, so I suppose, to a degree, I relate to all of them even if I wouldn’t necessarily talk like them or make those decisions or even view the world the way they do. Of the three characters, [Horace] is probably the one most like me. The high school kid is by far the least like me. I mean, the kid hates rock music; I’m a rock critic. The kid has no posters on his wall; my room was covered in posters.

The old guys at the coffee shop refer to liberal, animal-rights activist urbanites as “orange juice drinkers.” Where did you get that?
Oh yeah. The stuff about calling people from California orange juice drinkers, that’s directly from my dad. That’s exactly what my dad and his friends would say. And people’s relationships with animals is much different in a farming community than in an urban area. In New York, and I’m sure even in Minneapolis, people who have only grown up in urban areas, they really have a hard time seeing the difference between animals and people. And they somehow try to completely block out of their minds that the food they’re eating comes from an animal. So to the people where I grew up, and in North Dakota towns in general, the idea of keeping a dog in the house at that time was just nuts—and now everybody does it.

In this book, Minneapolis serves as an abstract idea of the big city. Is that what it meant to you growing up?
You know, it was a scary place to drive into. I remember the first time I drove in Minneapolis—I think it was between my junior and senior years in high school—I was really worried about it. And they had the pro sports team, so it seemed like a national city.

There are so many references to Tommy Kramer in the book.
Because that was the home team for people in North Dakota. People often ask me, “You’re from North Dakota, so what was it like growing up in a place where there was no local team?” Everybody rooted for the Vikings and the Twins.

I read an interview you did with ESPN’s Bill Simmons a few years ago where you said you hated Vikings fans but considered it almost morally correct to root for the Twins.
Well, the Twins are sort of the ideal franchise to root for, for altruistic purposes. I mean, they have a really low payroll, they always seem to have the most likeable guys, and they have this great farm system where, you know, when they get rid of Santana everyone’s like, “OMG, they’re getting nothing in return!” But they seem to always find guys, and they always end up being respectable.

They’re owned by a guy who probably foreclosed on your great-uncle’s farm, though. But OK, I get the Twins thing. But why the animosity toward Vikings fans?
Well, at first it had to do with my allegiance to Green Bay. My reasons for liking Green Bay are really weird. Here again, I guess this is my father’s fault in the sense that when I grew up, he despised Minnesota, and later I found out why. During the sixties, when it was the NFL and the AFL, CBS showed the NFL games, and that’s when the Packers were really great. So those are the games we got here. And then when the Vikings franchise was launched, that became the game that was on every week. So my dad could never watch the Packers and, therefore, hated Minnesota. But also, I think Vikings fans are just this interesting kind of doomed person. It’s this doomed franchise. And I’ve just never been the kind of person who generally roots for the home team. I didn’t like the Vikings growing up, and when I lived in Akron, I hated the Browns, and I hated the Indians. I just don’t like people who root for a team just because it happens to be there. I would root for the Twins if they were in San Antonio.

Tell me about it. I talked myself into believing in Tarvaris Jackson this off-season.
I had to agree with the announcers this weekend. I don’t know why they booed every incompletion.

Racism?
Well, maybe. I guess [Vikings fans] didn’t like Culpepper that much, either. Which is weird, because that one year, Culpepper basically had as good a year as anybody has had over the last twenty-five. The thing about Tarvaris Jackson, though, is that the Vikings defense this year is awesome, and they have the best running back in the league. I suppose in some people’s minds, they think the Vikings really have the pieces to challenge for a Super Bowl, and we just can’t win a Super Bowl with Tarvaris Jackson. That he would be worse than Trent Dilfer. That he would be the worst quarterback to ever play in a Super Bowl.

You were born in Minnesota. Technically.
Well, that’s just because . . . have you ever been to Wahpeton?

No. Is it a border situation?
Yeah, Breckenridge is directly across the river, which makes it confusing. Sometimes people will be like, “Aha! He writes about North Dakota, but he was born in Minnesota! Aha!”

There is a strong libertarian streak in the book. You told Time Out New York that you decided to write fiction because, “if you write something in memoir fashion, anything you say is going to be taken as a literal depiction of how you view the world. If you place it into the mouth of a character, it’s not that way.” So do you think people would get pissed at you if you admitted that growing up, you had mildly racist friends or were offended by the liberal bias in M*A*S*H?
Sometimes I think problematic conversation is really entertaining and interesting. If I wrote those things in an essay with the intent of entertaining people, I now realize, at this point in my life, that those things will be attached to me forever, and they will affect how people consume the work. There’s the one scene in the book where the Vance character is talking to the Julia character, and he hates every band except for the Rolling Stones. Now if I wrote an essay and made those comments about ELO or whatever, there are some people who would say, “Fuck that dude, he hates ELO.” And I don’t. But I think it’s interesting and funny that somebody could make that argument about them. And I wanted to have the old guys be able to debate problems like Columbus Day. I didn’t want to have to go—like in an essay—“Well, somebody could say this, and maybe this is more true.” I just wanted the language to be out there, and then people could say, “Well, who do I relate to the most? Which of these guys do I agree with?”

There’s a salient anti-government streak in the book. Mitch is being taught in 1984. The narrator illuminates the notion of the heroic individual inherent in the Rocky mythology. Gordon Kahl, a sort of proto-Timothy McVeigh, is a presence. Your characters out in ND seem to be self-reliant, whether by default or not, and seem to want to be left alone. Did any of that NoDak libertarianism rub off on you?
Well, I feel like there is this libertarian aesthetic in North Dakota. Although, I think very few people in the Upper Midwest would self-identify as libertarian even though they might carry their ideology.

Well, there is Horace’s interior monologue about how he can’t understand people who don’t want to pay their taxes.
So are you asking me why I put these things in the book, or are you asking me . . . ?

Well, they’re in the book. And it’s obviously coming from a different place than if this was written about New England or New York or California.
Yes. New York is a different country. It really is. I don’t know any conservatives. I don’t really know any people who would be viewed as moderate in any city but here. I consider myself to be pretty ideologically moderate as far as politics goes.

Is that one of the reasons you wrote the book? To help people understand what’s right with North Dakota as it were?
No, no, no, no. No way. When I was in Fargo, I would often be in political conversations where I would have to sort of take the position of being the most left. And now, when I’m in New York, I have to often take the position of being the most right in the conversation. One thing I feel good about politically is that all of my conservative friends think I’m some crazy drug-eating liberal. And all of my liberal friends think I watch Fox News. And I think that is when you succeed. When people on the fringes think that you’re against them, and you have both fringes against you—then you’re doing well.

Another thing you seem to be interested in is subtext. The narrator translates both a conversation between Vance and Julia and the answers Mitch provides for his essay exam on 1984. Do you think people living in small towns have more subtext in their lives than people in big cities?
Probably. Probably because they are less willing to talk about themselves at any opportunity. You would even see this in the difference between, say, a twenty-five-year-old who lives downtown or near Calhoun Square and a twenty-five-year-old who lives in Alexandria, Minnesota. I guarantee you that just by the nature of the kind of people who tend to inhabit those cultures, the city person is more willing to talk about themselves and, in a way, finds themselves more interesting to other people, naturally. They also assume—and this is not always a bad quality, it’s a good quality too—that people want to understand who they are. In smaller communities, it feels uncomfortable to feel that way sometimes because nobody else does.

Do they assume that people know too much about them already?
Or, “It doesn’t really matter what I say. They already have a fixed perception of who I am.”

Another thing I noticed is the nonchalance with which you disclose the future, especially concerning minor characters. You would just slip in, “and in fifteen years she would gain sixty-five pounds.” What led you to the spoiler as stylistic conceit?
Well, I suppose, in a strange way, I kind of did steal that. Did you see the movie Run, Lola, Run?

Sure.
You know, occasionally there will be a scene in that movie where the main character will run by, say, a woman pushing a baby carriage, and you will see these five images of what her life will be like because of this chance encounter. How her life will end up. I really loved that. I thought that was awesome. Because very often when I read a book, I’m not the kind of person who imagines the book has any life beyond the work itself. I think the author basically has the decision to say how much we know about these people. So if the author doesn’t say what happens to them, no one knows. So I would just kind of like throw a snapshot in there about what might happen to one particular kind of tangential character. In fact, at one point, I was considering that at the end of the book, I would basically list every character mentioned and talk about how they died. Because everyone is going to die, obviously. But I thought that would be a little too much like the end of Six Feet Under.

I want to discuss one more stylistic tic of yours: You’ve been doing the parenthetical thing for some time; is it just to pack nuance into a sentence? Why do you do that?
Well, I do use a lot of parentheses and a lot of semicolons. (And people sometimes point this out.) And I use footnotes sometimes, too. I guess I feel like all three of those things, those punctuation forms, are just ways to get more information into sentences. You have a sentence with an idea, and you add a parenthetical, which sort of suddenly changes the context of it. If you use a semi-colon instead of two sentences, you have one sentence that people intellectually are going to combine to place within the same meaning. And if you have a footnote, it’s just like showing bonus information. I don’t use footnotes in this novel, obviously. But I like punctuation a lot. I use a lot of it. It’s sort of interesting—so many other languages, non-English languages like German or Spanish, they have the male and the female. Everything is male or female. At first it sort of confused me, but now I’ve kind of realized that they do that because they feel it can create a richer, more sophisticated meaning. I guess it’s probably the same kind of thinking.

Finally, would you mind going through a speed round to determine what percentage was based on truth and what was completely fabricated.
Well, let’s see.

Buck Buck’s bisexual kissing compulsion?
Not true.

The backup quarterback crying in his bedroom?
I’m sure it’s happened but not to anybody I know.

The “you can’t con an honest man” NFL gambling grift?
Made up.

The sixth-grade girl who excelled at football.
Well, I’ll say this: my older sister, who was three years older than me—had she been able to play high school football, would’ve been the greatest wide receiver in high school history. So I guess it’s based on the fact that I knew a girl could make those catches.

Ted’s kissing triangle in college?
  Made up.

Cubby Candy’s Doberman take out?
Made that up.

And the teacher who constantly says, “This is the situation. The situation is this?”
That used to be said by a coach in Breckenridge, Minnesota, who I never met. But one summer I worked in Breckenridge coaching basketball and track for little kids, and they used to mock this coach by using that phrase. I don’t even know the coach’s name.