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 Gordon 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.