Over the years Chuck Klosterman’s worn many hats: he’s been an ethics columnist for the New York Times, a sportswriter for ESPN and Grantland, and he’s written extensively about music. A journalist by trade, Klosterman’s also a novelist and he appears on podcasts to say things like “Radiohead is both over- and underrated at the same time.” One thing Klosterman is not: a scientist.
Despite that seemingly large obstacle, in 2016 Klosterman published What If We’re Wrong, a book positioning itself as “Thinking about the present as if it were the past.” Thought experiments abound: what rock band will be remembered in a few hundred years, what novels will last, that sort of thing. Says the book’s jacket copy:
“Klosterman askes straightforward questions that are profound in their simplicity… the most thought-provoking and propulsive book of his career.”
Well, if they say so…
I tried with What If We’re Wrong. I really did. But I bailed around the time he started rambling about how we live in a simulation, when he argued in favour of a lunatic theory about missing time and took Malcolm Gladwell seriously. I made it through the first chapter where he introduces a theory where “the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts it’s potential wrong-ness to begin with,” by which I think Klosterman means that his best guess will probably be wrong. One wonders why he’d write a book where he admits he’s going to be wrong, but then again, he also names his theory after himself: Klosterman’s Razor. Interesting, that.
In the first essay, he argues that “Nobody is remembered beyond a few totemic figures” but also that literary canons only exist so we can argue about them. And then: “I suspect that whoever gets arbitrarily selected to represent turn-of-the-21st century literary greatness… is either totally unknown or widely disrespected.” He cites Kafka and Herman Melville as examples of people who have achieved posthumous fame. So, if I’m following his logic, the canon only exists for elites to argue over them, but the masses will remember someone who is more down-to-Earth and connects with them. I guess?
He elaborates by describing a pyramid (don’t worry, I actually took the time to draw it out). At the top you have the elites (Klosterman suggests Philip Roth), then people who have written one or two great works, then the best-selling authors (Danielle Steele, for example), then the cult writers (Klosterman suggests Dennis Cooper for this level) and then at the bottom the “Quietly Unrated,” which is all the stuff that gets released and quietly forgotten - “The vast majority of American writers,” says Klosterman.
If you’re hoping he goes out and makes a prediction, don’t hold your breath. He does think David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest will become the 9/11 book (despite being published a few years before the attack - and in spite of people trying to claim that Franzen’s The Corrections already has that title). He also seems to be arguing that in the future, people will not be reading the book in the context of its time, but instead as a cipher to explain its times. I’m not exactly sure how a book published before Sept. 11, 2001 will explain how the United States reacted to that terrorist attack, but then I’m not exactly sure Klosterman does either.
Indeed, as someone who tries to make their living by writing about books, his argument strikes me as quite basic. A look at the NYRB Classics backlist, for example, shows a lot of books that were well-received but fell out of print (Kingsley Amis, Darcy O’Brien) in addition to books that came out but were kind of forgotten (Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra At the Wedding comes to mind). For every rediscovered classic there’s a Dickens, a Bronte, a Hemingway - someone who was popular in their lifetime and remains so today. As even Klosterman concedes, Kafka did have some success. So even the examples he thinks of don’t really work. So much for his razor.
By the second essay, his razor is clogged with gunk and hair. He argues circles around himself about what rock musician will be remembered by history. But instead of being someone who we don’t anticipate, it’ll be either Bob Dylan or Elvis Presley - two of the most famous musicians ever. He goes back and forth, talking to everyone from Alex Ross to Amanda Petrusich, but eventually he doubles back on himself - it won’t be Elvis, Dylan or even The Beatles, but Chuck Berry, a guy who hit his creative peak in the late 1950s and was a spent force by 1972, when his cover of “My Ding-a-Ling” hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Berry is someone who’s been famous since rock music first became a popular genre - it’s not exactly a bold statement.
By this point, I was struggling with the book. I hadn’t been so angry at something since Sexual Personae and even there, one gets the sense Paglia is trying to provoke the reader. I think Klosterman is too good natured for that. By the third chapter, Klosterman is getting people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene to lay out their ideas of how the universe works, but after a dozen pages or so, he throws readers a curveball: “I dig the simulation argument,” he says, and then lets Nick Bostrom explain how we all live in a simulation and gives him equal weight.
If that name sounds familiar it’s because Bostrom is associated with longtermism, a movement recently profiled by Salon Magazine. There, writer Emile P Torres points out how Bostom co-authored a paper exploring the possibility of making super-smart people by only using embryos with “desirable” traits, destroying the rest. He points out how Bostrom suggests that people with low IQs might outbreed more “intellectually talented” people.
So: Klosterman gives equal time to a guy who isn’t just promoting what strikes me as eugenics - but someone who was doing it as far back as twenty years ago, meaning Klosterman either didn’t really look up his interviewee’s work, or he just doesn’t doesn’t really care.
The rot goes deep here. Some of the conspiracy theories Klosterman endorses have gone off and caused actual harm to American democracy - simulation theory is now parroted by people who call others NPCs and think it’s not a problem to harm them. Others are out to lunch - he devotes a lot of time to “missing time” which seems utterly unhinged. I skimmed through the rest of What If We’re Wrong and even when he argues about the relevance of stuff like football or Roseanne Barr he just seems like a man trying to swim out of a sealed reservoir. He’s utterly out of his depth.
Klosterman used to be an interesting writer who thought outside the box, but he’s aged into someone who tries too hard to be weird. In 2022, he comes off like someone who argues in bad faith (does he really believe anything he wrote here?) and just tries too hard to be different. Maybe he should leave the physics to actual scientists, avoid people who make arguments about who should be allowed to breed, and stick to writing long-winded essays where he compares David Thompson to an aircraft carrier.