I just finished Chuck Klosterman’s latest book, Football, which is one of the most unusual artifacts of 21st century publishing I have seen to date.

The Strangeness of Football: A Portrait of the Artist as a Free Man

The structure of the book is a series of chapters/essays, each dealing with a specific aspect of the titular game and its cultural impact. But that’s the wrong way to think about this book. This is not an anthology of essays in the style of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation , where each piece advances a thesis with prosecutorial force, building its argument brick by brick until the reader finds every exit sealed off and has no choice but to concede. Sontag writes essays the way a chess player plays chess — every move is in service of a predetermined endgame, and the pleasure (or discomfort) comes from realizing you’ve been cornered.

Klosterman intermittently appears to be doing something similar, advancing a rather clear thesis in the introduction:

Football is the clearest projection of how people of the United States think and of what those people value […] The role it plays in the shaping of our contemporary reality is both outsized and underrated. And this is going to pose a problem in the future, because football is doomed, and all those people who do not yet exist are going to misunderstand why it once mattered as much as it did.
– Klosterman, pg. 2

There are sections throughout the book where Klosterman appears to be marching toward this conclusion, where one can feel the swell of analytical rigor rising toward some promised end.

But Klosterman has no intention (no interest, is perhaps more apt) of delivering on that promise. His chapters are less arguments than they are environments. He drops you into a topic–the relationship between football and television, the ethics of acceptable risk, the GOAT debate as epistemological dead end–and then just… walks around inside it. He advances a claim, undercuts it with a tangent, rebuilds it from a completely different angle, and then closes with something that feels less like a conclusion than a shrug that somehow contains the whole essay.

Is this a feature or a bug? I think it depends on your expectations. Sontag’s mode–call it the essay as argument–assumes the writer has arrived somewhere the reader hasn’t yet, and the essay is the vehicle for getting them there. Klosterman’s mode assumes that the writer and the reader are both still in transit, and that the value of the essay lies not in its destination but in the quality of the thinking along the way.

The book is not an expert cultural analysis but rather a confessional-style examination of the author’s feelings on complicated (though often, seemingly-trivial) subjects. Klosterman puts his feet up on the therapy couch, invites us into the session, and begins.

One gets the sense that this is the kind of meandering, self-indulgent book that only gets published when the author has seized control of his own destiny. Football is Klosterman’s thirteenth book, and the success of his publishing career over the last 25 years has clearly afforded him the luxury of control over this work. In fact, he seems to have saved this topic, of such high personal import, for precisely this moment. This is his book, not a commercial product, and you can take it or leave it.

The Glory of Football: A Portrait of the Free Man as an Artist

Can a meandering, self-indulgent book be good? The answer largely comes down to some mix of the quality of the writing and the reader’s willingness to trust the writer.

To be sure, this is not a book for someone with no interest in football or American culture. But the hallmark of Klosterman’s writing, for me, has always been his ability to make the ordinary seem urgent–to take something you thought you understood and rotate it until it looks unfamiliar–and Football is no exception. At times esoteric, at others disorganized, the book is nevertheless full of provocative questions and highly-original takes, all delivered with Klosterman’s signature self-deprecating wit. It is genuinely fun to read, even when you are not entirely sure where it is going.

More importantly, the book fits neatly into the larger project of Klosterman’s oeuvre: giving serious and thorough treatment to topics that are typically considered unworthy of such effort. Whether he is extolling the virtues of lowbrow culture in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs or mapping the emotional physics of small town life in Downtown Owl, Klosterman has spent thirteen books and twenty-five years insisting that the things people actually care about–the dumb, beloved, embarrassing things–deserve the same quality of attention we reserve for “capital-S Serious” subjects. Football is maybe his purest expression of this impulse: a book that treats America’s most popular sport with the analytical gravity of a philosophical text while never pretending it isn’t also a game where large men crash into each other over a leather ball.

Benoît Lelièvre at Dead End Follies gets this just right in his review of the book when he quotes Klosterman:

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.

This writerly ethos resonates with what I’m trying to do at The Ragged Frontier. Klosterman and I share a conviction that analytical effort is not just an intellectual exercise but also a spiritual affirmation of life’s value. There’s a widespread assumption that certain topics come pre-sorted into bins marked “worthy of serious thought” and “not,” and that the bin determines how hard you should think. Klosterman has spent 25 years proving that assumption wrong. The best criticism isn’t the kind that picks important subjects; it’s the kind that treats whatever it picks as if it matters, and then makes you believe it.

Recommended for fans of football, Klosterman, and refusing to think about easy things easily.


Rating: 7/10