Average American Male : Bros before Hoes

January 9, 2008 by Jasper  Send to a Friend

After reading Chad Kultgen’s first novel, The Average American Male blogs are talking about showering or antibiotics, they’re talking about rubbing soap between the scintillating pages in hopes that the narrator will cease his dirty reportage the likes of some Los Angeles based Patrick Bateman, trading his Christopher Cross cds for sessions of Halo 2, toning down Patrick’s sanguinely violent murders of homeless men into fantasies of fucking senile teddy-bear-toting homeless women. Yet our hero is not a Christian-Dior-wearing, jelly-fish-eating, investment banker murdering his ex-girlfriends out of boredom. He is in fact the average American male, though I would argue that the title was an afterthought.

The status of average is translated into an anonymity the likes of Jeanette Winterson’s androgynous main characters, or post modern protagonists from novels that comment on the malignant narcissism of modern American living, of whom the details of job, upbringing, and even name are abandoned in an ambiguous invitation to relate to the character…or to alienate. One begins reading, ready to scorn this average sweater-wearing guy coming into the old underwear lying around his room, but soon we realize he is making fun of us, and he becomes not average, but actually heroic.

I say hero (anti-hero or whatever) because he possesses a superlative quality that sets him apart from everyone else: his capacity to render every person or situation into a pathetic, unimportant essence of pretension. His frankness is repellant but addictive and his impressions (rarely judgmental) are always correct, if not insightful. He is not afraid of being gross, at least not to himself, nor to us. And from this balls-to-the-wall sort of potty humor comes an striking/acerbic reduction of everything: when he thinks about the sexuality of little toddlers eating ice cream after church, or that of an old women dribbling yogurt out of her lips at the airport; when the success of his newest relationship with the Tori-Amos-hating cd store clerk is distilled into the number and variety of vaginal, anal, or oral sex encounters they have had; when everything decent and respectable about Oprah, shopping malls, and marriage is reduced into a guileless equation with fucking, in its goofiest, grossest manifestations. Nothing is above the coupling of mockery and the sexual muck of his fecund imagination. We don’t know what he does for a living because he “does nothing important.”

Instead we bear witness to an hilarious commentary of his quotidian escapades masturbating (Patrick Bateman’s video tapes have turned into gigabytes of internet porn on his external hard-drive), expertly playing video games, eating at varied and particular LA restaurants, and going to the occasional college party, bar, Circuit City, and book signing, always evaluating the women he encounters for masturbation material and ridiculing them for the empty symbols of consumer America, namely, marriage, Gwen Stefani, and California Pizza Kitchen, that they worship. It is not that he does not enjoy certain, fun aspects of consumer America, namely porn, video games, and MTV, but he does realize the vacuity of it all.

His insistence to father figures that he does “nothing important” for work becomes the stubborn banner of his lifestyle: he masturbates 5 times a day, shits, and farms gold in the Burning Steppes of World of Warcraft because there is nothing else to do, and he knows it. The utter negation of meaning in his life becomes his own pursuit of truth while he passively seeks out others who can see through Oprah’s bullshit. He is a keen and idealistic hero, a sort of lone wolf masturbating on the periphery laughing at himself laughing at the lame scenario in the porn. Though he avoids marriage with his fat-assed girlfriend and unwittingly meets the girl of his dreams, by the end she too has slipped into the paradigm of the marriage-hunting female, and tragically he is forced to capitulate.

This is the new American novel with its monotone vulgarity and pared down writing style. This is what we are all doing on the weekends, what we are all thinking when we see fat people, or when we have sex. I can’t wait to be the main character for Halloween.

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