College

Quarterly
Summer 2005 -
Volume 8
Number 3

Bildungsroman: What Students Read ... If They Do

by Howard A. Doughty
Books Discussed:

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, Chuck

Klosterman (New York: Scribner, 2005)

Indecision, Benjamin Kunkel (New York: Random House, 2005)

According to novelist and critic Jay McInerney, the modern form of

the American bildungsroman dates from the publication, in 1951, of J. D.
Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. He goes on to say that there has
been a perceptible literary evolution since Holden Caulfield detected the
ubiquity of "phonies". The coming-of-age novel, in McInerney's opinion,
was "reinvigorated by feminism in the 70's [sic], urbanized and coked-up
in the 80's [sic]... grunged-down and nonfictionalized in the memoir-mad
90's [sic]" (McInerney, 2005, p. 1). Always the optimist, he admits being
"disappointed and frequently bored senseless by the antics of Holden's
progeny," but remains hopeful that one day he will encounter a "post 9/11,
postironic novel [that is ready to] move beyond irony and youthful
nihilism." His expectations anticipate neither great art nor great insight:
"For connoisseurs," he says, "the real reward of the bildungsroman is not
eventual wisdom but stylish confusion" (McInerney, p. 12). No more can
sensibly be asked.

Concerning the evolution of the genre, I would go further. I would

make an almost categorical distinction between books written before and
the putative "summer of love." That would make Richard Faria's Been
Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966) one of the last of its kind.
Soon afterward, Norman Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night: History
as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968). Then, as we are too often told,
the world changed. In that particular shake-up, the distinction between
fact and fiction was self-consciously blurred and has not quite been
clarified even now.

That, of course, does not mean that there is no more "coming of

age" fiction; it merely means that we have lost our sense of what counts
and what does not count as imaginative, creative writing. We may have
lost something else as well.

In the past, every generation seemed to witness the publication of a

few iconic books that more or less defined at least certain groups of
young people. Either by documenting the sorts of angst experienced in
the process of maturation or by composing some other sort of fiction that
appealed strongly to young folk as they matured, a special relationship
was struck between a particular "cohort" (or a recognizable portion
thereof) and some entertaining scribbling. Some works were more fact
than fiction; some were more fiction than fact. Some took the form of
(gonzo) journalism; some tried for poetry; some, of course, remained as
loyal as could be expected, to the standard rules of narrative story-telling
(though ambiguity generally prevailed as to whether certain novels were,
in fact, mainly memoirs). Blame the 500 channel universe. Blame "zines"
and "blogs". Blame whole language learning.

Depending on both cultural and demographic variables, many

adolescents and young adults of my generation gravitated to books such
as Salinger's account of the formative experiences of youth. Others took
to Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Alan Ginsberg had his share of
devotees, as did (in my case, at least) Albert Camus (The Stranger, The
Plague and The Fall) and Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea). In time, John
Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor), Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange
Land), Herman Hesse (Siddhartha), John Irving (The World According
to Garp), Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Thomas
Pynchon (V), Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas),
Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five) and Tom Wolfe (The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test) would (among many others) win their due amount of
popularity.

Feel free to add others to the inventory. Those with no sense of

shame could include Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, Erich Segal's Love
Story, Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, or the poetic
oeuvre of Rod McKuen. There is lots of room. Neither principles of
enduring value nor transitory good taste need apply. There might even be
room for a Canadian: try Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. Eventually,
however, the list ends.

Of late, perhaps as a result of declining literacy or diminishing

interest in literature, such at least temporarily monumental writers seem
less in evidence. If words mean anything anymore, they are likely
accompanied by music. From Bob Dylan to Amanda Marshall and Alanis
Morisette, popular songwriters seem to have taken centre stage. Of
course, it may just be that younger people feel no need to inform older
people of their serious reading habits, just as high school students,
college undergraduates and disparate bohemians of forty and fifty years
ago felt little compulsion to share their enthusiasm for Howl and Cat's
Cradle with their moms, dads and teachers; still, I cannot help worrying
that library reading rooms have been largely replaced by MTV and iPods.
Others worry too. Others sometimes become very cranky when they
contemplate and comment upon the flimsy relationship between their
children and the noble world of literature.

Censorious sociologists and condescending social critics tell us that

the "Baby Boom Echo" (people born between about 1982 and 1995,
which is to say most of our current and future students) combine tediously
conventional beliefs and relentlessly conformist "values" with an absence
of sustained interest in the printed page. The kids just want to fit in. They
want to shop. They "text message." They have (in two merciless
metaphors that I recently overheard) the attention span of gnats and the
fidelity of fruit flies. Books do not give instant jolts. Books are boring. Not
even the magic of Harry Potter stands much of a chance of bringing their
minds into regular contact with an authorial presence and an authoritative
text. That is what is said. I refuse, on frightfully little evidence, to believe
it.

I must refuse lest I be tempted to chuck the entire business of

teaching and seek out a palm tree beneath which to cogitate (or vegetate)
for what remains of my life. I would certainly get the heck out of the
classroom. Instead, I choose to think that our students do read, and admit
only that their choices may be merely more eclectic, more diverse and
more likely to be stored in more fragile containers than ours were at a
similar age.

At the same time, if only because of nostalgia for small book shops
that smelled of old wood and leather and were staffed by people who not
only knew but also loved their trade, I want to think that books of some
modest quality continue to be written for and by people under forty. I want
to encourage the writing and reading of such volumes. They do exist. I
have the evidence. I have two representative examples at hand.

Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live is one. The

bildungsroman is a form best suited to a first novel, composed in the
callow flower of early life. It should certainly not wait until even early
middle age. Klosterman, who writes for Spin, Esquire and GQ and is the
author of Fargo Rock City and Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs slips in
under the wire.

Ostensibly the story of a mad dash across the United States in

search of the places where rock musicians perished, it is advertised as a
reflection on death, popular culture and the relationship between the two.
We imagine we may hear pithy remarks on mortality and the meaning of
this final career move for the likes of Kurt Cobain and Ronnie Van Zant.
On the other hand, although the Buddy Holly-Ritchie Valens-Big Bopper
plane crash is given full treatment, mainly for inspiring Don McLean to tell
us in eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds about the day the music died
Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin, are not mentioned despite
the fact that Klosterman's odyssey begins at the Chelsea Hotel in New
YorkJanis' old hangout. He starts there because that is where Sid
Vicious (allegedly) stabbed his girl friend to death before taking a drug
overdose prior to the case against him going to trial. Elvis gets a
dismissive mention ("20 million Elvis fans can, in fact, be wrong"). Others
get similarly short shrift: "I do think about what it would have been like if
he had lived, and sometimes I worry that he would have made a terrible
MTV Unplugged in 1992. But Lennon," Klosterman assures us, "is not
someone I need to concern myself with today ... " Of course not. The
author was only eight years old when Mark David Chapman assassinated
Yoko Ono's husband. And, besides, this is not a book about death, or rock
stars or pop culture. It is all about the author. It is narcissistic, self-
indulgent and only "85%" true.

It is also mildly endearing and occasionally good fun. Klosterman is

mostly interested in sex and, remember, it is all about him. The book
works because, unlike John Irving's disclosures in Until I Find You,
Chuck Klosterman did not wait until he was long in the tooth to tell his
audience about his affair with an older woman. In Klosterman's case,
moreover, the older woman was merely "older" by nine years (he was 20
and she was 29), a modest gap that is still within a human time-scale. His
story is not about child abuse.

American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis claims that Klosterman

has an "old-fashioned, all-American voice: bighearted and direct, bright
and unironic, optimistic and amiable, self-deprecating and reassuring-with
a captivating lack of fuss or pretension." Bret Easton Ellis should know.

Of course, critics can be found who think that Chuck Klosterman is

annoying. They include geezers who are appalled at the fact that
Klosterman owns well over 2,000 CDs, including all 26 KISS releases and
a Peter, Paul and Mary "Best of ... " collection from which he has never
bothered to remove the cellophane wrap. They will lament his lack of vinyl
and shake their heads sadly when he acknowledges that he does not
even own a record player. Klosterman is definitely digital. For them, "Pip"
may be the epitome of a suitable character coming of age. They may
even have read Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (in
translation, of course). They will demand that something be made of the
substance of Klosterman's cross-continent quest for meaning in the
gleanings of the Grim Reaper. Klosterman disappoints on this score. He
has to. He says of his book: "I was hoping that because it was death-
oriented I would find some unifying principle." Spending three weeks
inspecting scenes of suicide, murder and plane crashes, he wondered at
the outset if thinking hard about mortality would affect the way he lived
the rest of his life or at least give him a deeper understanding of living a
better life. He failed. He had to. "It feels," he says, "like there should be
some sort of sweeping revelation at the end, but there's not. You can't go
to where Buddy Holly died and go 'Aha!' This is something that's
confusing forever." (Quoted in Bromstein, 2005, p. 87).

Well, maybe not forever. Or, perhaps there is just a certain age at
which we learn that confusing things can be set aside or conveniently
forgotten. I resist the effusive praise that is elsewhere heaped upon Mr.
Klosterman. His is probably not a "genius." His book is not all that "funny,"
"astute," and "canny" and he may not be as "incredibly sensitive" and
"likeable" as his most fulsome fans say. But he is a remarkably crafty
writer who is capable of delivering a poignant account of growing up
amidst in the midst of pervasive punkishness. He is a superannuated
teen-ager who gives as lucid a "voice" to his generation as can be
expected under the circumstances.

Benjamin Kunkel offers something rather different. The hero of this

self-assured debut novel is Dwight Wilmerding, a hapless twenty-eight-
year-old New Yorker who suffers from abulia, Dictionary.com's Word of
the Day for Monday October 4, 2004. It means a loss or impairment of the
ability to act or to make decisions. Dwight is an affable, overly self-aware
fool. He is regularly stymied by hesitancy and vacillationnot the sort that
paralyzes people who must decide whether to marry or change careers or
move to another country, but the sort that stops them cold when forced to
choose which color of sock to wear, or whether to eat a peach. Dwight
can be thoughtlessliterally diffident to the point of functional
ineffectiveness. This does not make for good relationships. He abandons
his girlfriend without much consideration or concern. He has no visible
marks or scars, though his distinctly incestuous attraction to his armchair
revolutionary sister could provide some.

Recently fired from his dead-end job at Pzfizer, he is invited to visit

Natasha, an old schoolmate in Quito, Ecuador.

At this point, Dwightduly fortified with an experimental anti-abulia

drug and the novel take off. Our underachieving hero is promptly
deposited in South America where, on no good evidence, he imagines
that he might resolve his issues with women by hooking up with Natasha,
whom he has not seen for a decade but is now the brightest candidate for
the position of his one true love. Unfortunately, no sooner are his feet
planted on Ecuadorian soil, than Natasha disappears and Dwight is left in
the company of her roommate Brigid, an anthropologist, a European
intellectual engag and an attractive young woman earnestly committed
to social justice. On cue, they decide to head for the country.

Now, it is plain, we have been set up for a novel about a quest. So

far, the structure follows the standard template of all such work from the
Odyssey to the Wizard of Ozexcept that Kunkel is sometimes
hilariously funny, has a fine ear for dialogue and occasionally
acknowledges but consciously breaks the rules.

As Dwight pursues his quest, he cheerfully partakes of the strange

fruit of the Lotus-eaters in the form of some vaguely Amazonian
hallucinogens. He also gives in to the temptations of Calypso and couples
with the fair Brigid. But what is the object of the quest?

As a sort of feckless fourth friend of Dorothy, it becomes clear that

he is not seeking a brain, or a heart or satisfactory amount of courage.
Unknown to himself, he is in need of a social conscience. Brigid earnestly
tries to make him aware of the injustice of poverty, disease and cruelty
beyond measure, but Dwight is a slow learner and, besides, he resists
instruction. It takes more than sex, drugs and the swipe of a machete to
overcome Dwight's pathological alienation, but it gets done, the story
being carried along by Kunkel's wit and verbal dexterity to a conclusion
that is sustained by a wonderful comedic talent that leads to a political
resolution ... of sorts.

This is where the critics come a bit unstuck. Jay McInerney is

enthusiastic but admits to some uncertainty. "If Kunkel had stopped his
 novel in midsentence some 20 or 30 pages before [Dwight experiences
his epiphany], he would merely have written the funniest and smartest
coming-of-age novel in years" (McInerney, 2005, p. 12). He seems to
worry, however, that the author may not be doing what he seems to be
doing. Has he written a post-postmodern book in which he dispenses with
irony and comes "actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre
principles or has he written a parody of the genre." McInerney takes the
plunge, but others may not or, worse, roll their eyes with despair at an
attempt to recover some measure of lost literary innocence.

My own view is that this is as useful a political novel as we are apt

to see for some time. Writes Margo Hammond bluntly: "The novel is not
agitprop" (Hammond, 2005, 21 August). It balances humor and an
awareness of horror in a manner that permits readers to laugh all the way
to commitment. Having been paid a seven-figure, pre-publication amount
for the motion picture rights, it seems plain thatas long as the film
producers have the good sense to pass over both Hugh Grant and
Leonardo DiCaprio for the lead roleauthor and publisher will also be
laughing all the way to the bank.

Works Cited
Bromstein, E. (2005, 25-31 August). Dead rock stars inspire America's
smartest pop journalist. Now.

Hammond, M. (2005, 21 August). Political fiction gets my vote. St.

Petersburg Times. Retrieved 28 August, 2005.
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/21/Books/Political_fiction_get.shtml

McInerney, J. (2005, 28 August). Getting it together. The New York

Times Book Review.

Howard A. Doughty teaches philosophy and evolutionary biology at Seneca College in

King City, Ontario. He can be reached at howard.doughty@senecac.on.ca.