Book Review: Readings

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

by Chuck Klosterman

Simon & Schuster, 235 pp., $23

Chuck Klosterman has a Ford Taurus with GPS, 600 compact discs, woman trouble, and a mission: touring the United States in search of rock-death landmarks, including but not limited to Duane Allman's motorcycle crash site; the Chelsea Hotel; West Warwick, R.I., where a hundred concertgoers burned to death; and the entire city of Seattle. He bird-dogs the Minneapolis apartment where Bob Stinson died. He dodges cottonmouths in the field where Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane went down. "Much like Alice Cooper," he proclaims, "we love the dead. Even when it's merely an accident, dying somehow proves you weren't kidding." The premise is – in the words of Klosterman's editor at Spin – "epic," but the real pleasures in this journey are found in the moments in between stops. Klosterman can still burn half a chapter riffing on Zeppelin and relating his romantic history to the KISS universe, but Killing is on the whole more introspective and more structurally uniform than previous outings (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs). He's well aware of what's going on ("Have I become so reliant on popular culture that it's the only way I can understand anything?"), and the book traces a path to the sort of self-understanding that can only be achieved by prolonged solo driving through the continental hinterlands. It's a worthwhile voyage. Removed from the insular and self-congratulatory world of rock criticism by his assignment, Klosterman turns his shrewd eye to how people die – and how people live. It's gratifying to see him rub elbows with (and receive advice about hunting dogs from) a crusty local at a motel bar in Dickinson, N.D., and do coin-op laundry after freebasing pot crumbs in Montana. And though it sounds patronizing to say so, he seems to grow up in the process. Klosterman may be the undisputed king of metadiscussion, and he may still devote his most rigorous analysis to pop-culture arcana – he starts a chapter by declaring Thomas Jefferson "hands down, the coolest president in American history" because of his affection for mastodons – but his insights cohere into a more complex portrait of our collective experiences on the great trans-American road trip.

Chuck Klosterman will be at BookPeople on Monday, Aug. 8, 7pm.