Litwack.org

So I read this book and had a conflicted reaction to it, but when I googled Chad Kultgen I realized something: years ago my agent had given me a draft copy of his first novel, The Average American Male. My agent is a young beautiful woman who is definitely not a sociopath, so after reading a chapter I wondered if she’d read it, and if so what a weird position she was putting herself in by giving it to me. Weird because if the message was “be more commercial, like this thing,” then she was trying to encourage me to write things that were okay for me but specifically pretty bad for people like her. What I read was like Tucker Max Jr., Seven-11 store brand energy drink pissed out and dried in 12 point Courier: the voice of a young white man figuratively butchering beautiful young women and fetishizing the parts. It was like the literary endpoint of Spike TV’s programming strategy – worse than boring, just obvious.

Had I realized this dude wrote Men, Women & Children I would have passed but I didn’t and I didn’t. There’s some grim shit in it and worse than the headlines (bulimia! suicide!) is the cataloging of the specific kinds of pornography some of the thirteen-year-old characters are aroused by, the play of that in their lives, and the accompanying social network messaging.

The sickness of division subjected on the young is a true and sad observation, as is the book’s underlining of the tension between our external Facebook-y faces and the increasingly fractured and obscenely specific things we do in private. I mean, I’m building a copy of a watch that was commissioned by CERN to withstand magnetism which is as gross and exclusively enabled by the internet as any niche porn fetish on the internet.

If I were Chad Kultgen reading this I would probably be thinking fuck you, I’m a good writer, who are you to judge me and what have you ever done? which is fair. I get the sense from the two interviews I read that he’s frustrated by critics/ex-girlfriends not understanding that just because you write about something it doesn’t mean you are that thing or sympathize with that thing. Also fair.