Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
by Chuck Klosterman
Scribner

It's telling that the only insightful moment of Chuck Klosterman's newest book, "Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story," comes not from the author, but from a Cracker Barrel waitress with whom he falls instantly in love.

In an attempt to understand what makes rock 'n' roll so full of myth and legacy, Spin sent Klosterman on a cross-country journey to various sites where rock musicians died and rock legends were born. Such a premise is certainly intriguing. Would visiting the bean field where Buddy Holly's plane crashed or the water where Jeff Buckley drowned give chills to a person so involved with rock 'n' roll? Would it tell us anything about rock itself?

After some pressuring from his editor, Klosterman reluctantly loads up a rented car and makes the trek. But what should be a contemplative travelogue quickly turns into self-centered memoir, as Klosterman conflates his thoughts on music trivia with his trivial thoughts on American culture and his troubled past romances.

For the most part, Klosterman — whose first two books, "Fargo Rock City" and "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs," celebrated the classic rock of his rural upbringing in Wyndmere, N.D., and pointed out sophmoric connections in American pop culture — rehashes much of his old material, while also including excessive self-analysis of past and present relationships. At times, he mines material from his Esquire column "Chuck Klosterman's America," dredging up such previously covered topics as Kobe Bryant's rape trial or the fine difference between a "nemesis" and an "arch-enemy."

Before the trip gets too far down the road, Klosterman's monologue grows as tiresome as the repetitive roadside scenery of the Great Plains. At one point, in an imaginary discussion, a girlfriend of Klosterman-past charges him with "conventional male idiocy" (a charge that nicely surmises most of Klosterman's observations) and he later says that he has no original ideas. If there is anything more frustrating than listening to a man go on about the fact that he has nothing good to say, it is a man who insists that you shouldn't listen to him. Even worse is listening to that man elaborate on the reasons why you shouldn't listen to him.

Trying to find redemption for Klosterman's views in his writing style proves equally as frustrating. His writing is comfortable and conversational, but his narration often veers wildly off course and there are several instances where he requires an "ANYWAY" to return. Klosterman's descriptive prose powers are lacking as well. His sketch of a woman's breast — "hot like the hood of a Trans Am that sat out in the sun" — conjures up this year's winner of the "Worst Writer of the Year" award, coincidentally also from North Dakota — "As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire."

So what should have been a thoughtful look at an essential element of rock instead becomes a poorly written blab at what's wrong with Chuck Klosterman: he's irresponsible, he takes nothing seriously and he falls instantly in and out love for no good reason. And of all the personal flaws the author describes, perhaps the worst of are his politics:

This is the kind of quandary that keeps people like me from sleeping; I never worry about nuclear war or the economy or if we need to establish a Palestinian state, but I spend a lot of time worrying about whether I need to purchase all the less-than-stellar Rolling Stones albums from the 1980s for cataloguing purposes (particularly Undercover, which includes the semi-underrated "Undercover of the Night").

And people wonder why America is going down the tubes.

To give Klosterman the benefit of the doubt, 15 percent of the story is supposedly fiction — or perhaps even much more, as Klosterman's nemesis lets us know — so he can at least be credited with successfully painting a stirring picture of an unlovable loser. But this unlovable loser doesn't offer much by the way of death's significance to rock, despite being on the road for two weeks.

And this is the reason for the profundity of the Cracker Barrel waitress, who notices Klosterman sitting by himself and matter-of-factly suggests that the sensation of time in our dreams may have been lengthened by our over-exposure to the speedy story telling and hyper-kinetic editing of television.

One wonders what she thinks about death and rock music.

— Taylor Carik (cari0021@tc.umn.edu)