Reality bites

YOU'VE got to hand it to Chuck Klosterman. In just under a decade, the journalist has built a national following that adores, loathes and shrugs him off in equal proportions. Given that he's done it writing both magazine and book-length ruminations on why '80s metal still matters makes his achievements less about hard work or hipster cred than a mystery of our cultural attention span.

It's the right time then to release "Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas," a compendium of columns and feature stories for periodicals such as Esquire, Spin and the New York Times magazine. Collected works usually come at points of retrospection, when writers decide to abandon old tricks or lie comfortably in their velvet rut (they're also quick and easy for publishers of a marketable author, a likely factor here). Because Klosterman's work usually reads as though he's buried chin-deep in his own bellybutton, this may be the most reflective look we get at his career.

For the three people left without an opinion, here's what you need to know. Klosterman grew up outside Fargo, N.D., in the 1980s and has written three books about heavy metal, rock star deaths and trashy pop culture (the 2003 bestseller "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto"). His journalism resembles that of a befuddled Malcolm Gladwell. Where Gladwell takes a cultural assumption and debunks it with an assured layering of evidence and analysis, Klosterman gets there through a series of if-then statements padded with "maybes" and "sort-ofs."

"In order to enjoy the Olympics," he contends in a piece that appeared in Esquire in 2004, "you can't think critically about anything; you just have to root for America ... and assume that your feelings are inherently correct.... [T]hey ask us to support athletes solely because they happen to stand on U.S. floors.... We could toss a bunch of serial killers into the pool in Athens, and we'd still be told to support their run for water polo gold. And isn't that style of thinking the core of every major (and minor) problem we have in this country?"

Whereas Gladwell's work implies that the world is understandable if we reach beyond our conceits, the world confuses the heck out of Klosterman, and most of his pieces are failed struggles to understand it. Depending on how charming or necessary you find that effort, Klosterman is either the voice of a generation, "toxic, disingenuous and stupid" as the New York Press weekly has claimed on several occasions, or that college friend you let rattle on about "Baywatch" because he's kinda funny but mostly harmless.