Talking with Chuck Klosterman: The Visible Man
Bestselling author Chuck Klosterman stopped by the Sirius XM studios this week to talk about his newest book, “The Visible Man.” It’s his second novel but Chuck has probably become most well-known for his pop culture driven non-fiction books and articles, including “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs”, and “Eating the Dinosaur”. He’s written articles for GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Spin, ESPN and The Washington Post to name a few and he now also writes for Grantland.com. Below are excerpts from the interview.
Ron Bennington: Chuck Klosterman is in studio with us. The brand new book is “The Visible Man.” I always want to be careful with a new novel, not to over explain it to the audience. When I read a novel I just like it to unfold. How about you? Do you like to know much about it?
Chuck Klosterman: That’s a very interesting question that I hadn’t thought about before. Cause a non-fiction book you sort of assume that you have to have a sense of what it’s going to be. A novel I guess, its more about the writing style.
Ron Bennington: I agree, it’s about the author’s voice. You’re going to trust the writer, or it may be just one of those things in life where the right book falls on you at the right exact time. There’s so many books where I think if I had read it at a different time, would I even have liked it as much?
Chuck Klosterman: Like what examples are you thinking of?
Ron Bennington: Like the Tom Wolfe Book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” I read it when I was a kid and for some reason I loved it. Recently I saw the Kesey documentary and I thought, holy shit those guys look like dicks. There was nothing really fun and cool about them. They were really bully boys. But I think at the time I was ready to go out and push the world around a little bit.
Chuck Klosterman: It’s really funny that you say that, because that’s part of the reason this book exists. By chance, for a non fiction book I was working on, I had to reread HG Wells “The Time Machine.” I was living in Germany at the time so I had to order it from the UK Amazon or German Amazon and the edition I got had both “The Time Machine” and “The Invisible Man” there, so I reread that too. You know, when I read that book in 5th grade, I remember plot elements and stuff. But what was interesting when I read it as an adult, was the invisible man was a fucking jerk. And I started to think, of course…the kind of person that would have both the mental ability to create invisibility and also the weird sort emotional mind frame to want to do that, would have to be this essentially unlikable egocentric person. But when you have to read a book when you’re young, you don’t think of things like that. There’s certain things you take at face value. And I know high-end literary people will say, “Catcher in the Rye” is not that great of a book, it’s really for people who are sixteen or seventeen. And yet, books that you read between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one really do form the way you look at the world. If I could have my books loved by any group of people it really would be people who were smart seniors in high school or interesting freshman in college because I think that’s the most meaningful time to read a book.
Ron Bennington: You get into something in this novel– what is a person really like? And it had me thinking quite a bit. And one of the things that he [the visible man] believes, is that a person is who he truly is, when nobody else is around.
Chuck Klosterman: You’re totally right about this in the context of the book. Of course, the character in this story is also very confused. And the thing that he’s confused about is– he has the idea that a person is only themselves when they’re not around anyone else. When they’re not reacting to any other stimuli, they’re actually anxiety free and relaxed and being who they are. And emotionally I understand that. I kind of agree with that. But intellectually, the only way to understand someone is through them talking. So, the only way to get inside someone’s mind is to have them interpret their thinking. In the book, the character is constantly trying to watch people when they’re alone, thinking he’s learning all these important things. But in fact, you learn much more about him through his interviews with the therapist.
Ron Bennington: What do you think about therapy itself? And let me also say this. I don’t know if I get all your views in this. I doubt very much that you’re speaking through the characters with your own personal views.
Chuck Klosterman: Well its weird because I’ve done a lot of first person non-fiction writing and once you do that, people kind of read all your work in that way. A friend of mind read this book and he said, you know when I started reading it I assumed you were the therapist and now I’m at the end, I realize you’re the invisible man. And I’m like, I guess I’m fucking both…I wrote it…but I’m not really either. The thing I like about doing novels as opposed to non-fiction is that if you write non-fiction, anything you say is going to be attached to you. You can’t bring up a thought problem without people saying, ‘this is what he is interested in,’ or ‘this is what he believes.’ But in a novel I can have people say things I think are interesting, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them.
Ron Bennington: Now Grantland of course, has gotten so much talk about it. The fact that you can watch ESPN and see commercials for a website still blows my mind. You started writing for magazines and stuff. The fact that you write for a website, and you can start getting reader response immediately, does that change the way you write? Does it become more of a conversation with the readers?
Chuck Klosterman: To be totally honest it makes it less fun. The thing is, when you would write for newspapers or magazines, you would put all this time into it, and then it would exist. And you were like, well ok, if somebody has a response to this, and that’s totally great if they do, they have to do the same thing. They have to put themselves in a position where they can publish the counter-idea. Online, not only can people respond immediately, they tend to respond without actually even reading what you’ve written. And I don’t want to sound too critical of this, because it’s just the way the world is now. I was surprised by the large amount of people who sort of look at media as something that they want to personally respond to. They don’t really look at it as a way to understand the world or learn about the world or understand ideas; they really want to be involved directly in the process. Like on Grantland, there’s a way to comment on our stories on Facebook and I just try not to look at them because I find it to be a very disenchanting process. I think it’s probably negative for writing because you can’t think about your reader when you’re writing. It just doesn’t work. In radio, do you imagine the people listening to this show?
Ron Bennington: I never do. I normally just imagine the people in front of me at the time. When you’re doing a free form type thing it’s almost like they [the audience] are a fly on the wall unless they’re calling in, and then you’re talking to them directly.
Chuck Klosterman: I just try to write for essentially a fake version of myself. Like what I would like to read if I could find this book or find this article. I’m really just writing to…not myself but sort of a version of myself. I feel every time you try to predict the audience it ends up seeming fake to people. People are very sophisticated when it comes to being able to sense the reality of the author or the speaker or whatever.
Ron Bennington: So it’s almost selfish. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Cause its like, a band that I tend to like, will be like, I want to express my own thing, not try to write a hit song. When you try to write a hit song, its one of the hardest things in the world to do, because you really do come off sounding fake.
Chuck Klosterman: At the same time, there’s been countless people who did– Paul McCartney and John Lennon would say, let’s sit down and write a swimming pool. And basically let’s write a song that buys swimming pools. Brian Wilson did this. There’s a lot of people who can do this very well. The people who create songs for like Britney Spears, they’ve almost taken this to a new tier– where the only things they think about is what things translate immediately. Writing is a little different than that. To me there is a big difference between writing and publishing. I love writing; and publishing is very anxiety ridden and weird and uncomfortable. But in order to have a life as a writer you have to publish.
Ron Bennington: Waiting for a response you mean?
Chuck Klosterman: The part that’s hard is the idea that, this thing that was important to you…was important only to you for a year. When I wrote this book, no one else saw it. I would just go to this office and write, and it was a totally intimate thing that had no involvement. Intimate is a weird word to use but there wasn’t anyone else involved. And now its coming out, so now its like the only thing that matters is other people’s responses. Now the reviews and the sales and all the things that go with it, that’s going to become the focus of my life in terms of my relationship with my editor and my publicist and my agent and all these things. And I have to go and do these interviews. I’ll do this one, and I’ll do another one right after it. And that’s a weird thing because no one goes into writing for that part of it, I don’t think. It’s sort of like, if you love music, and you became a musician and then you had to do a lot of other things. Like you had to make videos and do press and also deal with your staff and touring. You might be good at it, you might be bad at it but either way it was something that you didn’t really think about as part of the job when you took it.
Ron Bennington: You write about therapy in this novel a little bit and the therapist gets occasionally somewhat bored with the people who go in there. Have you ever done any therapy before?
Chuck Klosterman: Well that’s a very tricky question because, and I knew I would get asked about this when I started promoting this book…if I say that I have, the assumption will be … this experience somehow mirrors his experience. If I say that I haven’t that would lead someone to argue, ‘well how does he know what this experience is like…it’s this private intimate thing..how would he be able to know what this experience is like?’ So I’m not answering that question.
Ron Bennington: I love it man. Because the therapist of course, doesn’t come off the way therapists think of themselves. But it’s the way I kind of think of some therapist friends of mine.
Chuck Klosterman: (laughing) They’re going to love if they hear that. This is my thinking on this. I said before, what kind of person would want to have the power of invisibility? It would be a really smart, really narcissistic self-absorbed person who is so arrogant that they think it’s their right to see other people’s lives. But what kind of therapist would put up with that? Well it would have to be someone who is a little naive and mostly intimidated by people who express confidence. So I have these two principal characters…. I realize that if you want to be successful in fiction, you’re supposed to write relatable characters. I don’t know if anyone will do that in this book because one guy’s a jerk and the other person isn’t very smart but that was the only way it could happen. I want my fiction to seem like journalism even if its sci-fi like this– I want it to be as real as possible — and that was the only way I could imagine it happening— a bad person talking to a naive person.
Ron Bennington: And the voyeuristic aspect of it, I think is the number one past time in America right now. I think that’s why reality shows are so big right now. We constantly want to pull the curtain back no matter who it is; we constantly want to see private thoughts on Twitter. Has that changed in your lifetime?
Chuck Klosterman: It’s definitely changed. In the late 90s reality tv became this dominant medium. What became the most popular form of non fiction was memoir writing, which is basically an autobiography about an unfamous person. The internet started to emerge. The bar of celebrity went way down. What a magazine or what tv would classify as a celebrity suddenly changed. But now, because that happened and it was so jarring, we’re sort of moving back the other way. Now when we watch reality television, no one thinks that it’s real. If you watch the Basketball Wives or the Amazing Race the assumption is that the people you’re seeing are acting to a degree, or that some of these situations are contrived. When you read someone’s online profile or read their Facebook updates, we no longer think that’s the person– we think that it is the person’s construction of this other identity, so…superficial voyeurism went up but nobody really thinks that it’s real. The idea that we can actually understand someone– we’re not any closer to that. So our interest in that is never going to erode because there is just no way to see somebody else, without thinking, ‘they are aware that they are being observed and because of that their behavior is different.’
Ron Bennington: So who are we? At what point do you decide, this is who Ron is, this is who Chuck really is? Or can we ever get to that point?
Chuck Klosterman: I think that there was probably a time that really predates us– 18th century or the 19th century where there was the possibility that somebody could be living a life where the main purpose was, for lack of a better term– survival– getting by. Maybe they were moving west. They were alone in a really real way. Not only were they alone but if they died no one would even care. It’s very difficult now. It’s very difficult to do anything without sort of the awareness that we are in a society. And I just kind of use myself as a gauge. Am I really myself right now? I’m not really. I’m the version of myself who goes on radio. So I’m trying to be authentic as possible, but I can tell I’m being fake. I can tell part of this is fake. I wouldn’t talk like this if I had just run into you at a bar.
Ron Bennington: But there’s that Vonnegut line that we really are who we pretend to be.
Chuck Klosterman: When I worked at Spin magazine, I did a story on U2. And I was with Bono in Ireland. And at one point we’re leaving the studio and there were all these kids hanging out. I think the kids might have been from Switzerland or Sweden for some reason, and they’re hanging outside U2s studio. And for whatever reason, Bono stops the car, gets out to talk to them, I’m still in the car, and all of a sudden, all the kids are in the car. He puts in the unreleased U2 album in and starts singing along with it. And these kids– their mind is blown. So I’m wondering, is this real? Is this fake? Is it fake because I’m here and he knows a reporter is here. And I started to think about all my encounters with Bono and how they all seemed a little bit fake. And yet they all seem that way. Which means if he is fake all the time, that is who he is. That’s totally real then, you know? He seems like somebody, he acts like someone who is always being observed. And because such a huge part of his life is, I think he has adopted that. And so the idea that we are who you pretend to be, that’s totally true– particularly if you pretend to be that person all of the time.
Ron Bennington: And the fact of the matter is, his celebrity is so big that he has to put on the Bono cloak.
Chuck Klosterman: Well its odd because the other guys in U2 aren’t like that. And when you talk to the other guys in U2 about this– I asked them directly after this encounter– I was talking to their drummer and I was like, this happened. Now is there any part of this encounter, of him picking up random strangers, pulling them in the car, singing to them; is there any part of that, do you think, was fake. And the drummer essentially said, it’s probably a little fake but it’s how he always is. So if you say someone is always fake, then they’re not fake anymore. If someone has a different personality on Facebook than they are in real life, but Facebook becomes the most important aspect of their life– all their friend interaction, all their work networking, sort of all their enjoyment comes from that– eventually that character is who they are– more than the person who created it.
Ron Bennington: I gotta let you go man. Go to Grantland.com to check out Chuck and of course the new book is out. And you need to pick up the novel– hang with it for a couple of days. Turn off the computer every once in a while and just get inside this. The Visible Man.
==============================
To hear this interview in its entirety, check out Ron Bennington Interviews on Sirius XM on Stars Too and The Virus channels. Don’t have Sirius XM yet? Click here to get a free trial subscription.
Visit Chuck Klosterman on twitter at @cklosterman
You can click the link below to pick up a copy of Chuck’s new novel, “The Visible Man.”
And you can watch the trailer for Chucks New Book here as well:
