Review: The Average American Male

a novel by Chad Kultgen (Harper Perennial, 2007)

They say the average male thinks about sex every eight to ten seconds – but that’s child’s play for the nameless narrator in Chad Kultgen’s debut novel. Aiming here to bring down that average by about nine seconds, Kultgen throws kerosene on the spreading pop-culture bonfire known as Fratire – a chauvinistic and unapologetic thumb in the eye of a society that has become perhaps too sensitive to gender differences. About as topical and timely as the cover article in this week’s Maxim magazine, and equally as important to the contemporary literary scene, The Average American Male makes me feel by turns strangely justified in and incredibly ashamed of being a 20-something urban-dwelling guy.

Raining f-bombs over the page like Dresden 1942, and leaving the dignity of women to cower in the basements, Kultgen has crafted a narrative that exposes the audacious, one-track mindset of Generation Y’s vapid Everyman. The book’s uninhibited narrator – who refers to women of all ages almost exclusively as “bitches” – shit-talks his way through a plotless novel about masturbating, playing video games, anal sex with strangers, masturbating, breaking up with girls for no good reason, masturbating, dating girls for no good reason, and drinking with his boys. Occasionally, it’s good, guilty fun: Kultgen’s snide candor is sometimes snort-out-loud funny, and is more often jaw-droppingly tactless. But the problem is this: it’s near impossible to sift out which aspects of Kultgen’s novel are satirical send-ups of modern masculinity, and which represent the actual thought processes of those misogynistic, cologne-bathed meatheads. I want to say, “I get it,” that the whole thing was written as a tongue-in-cheek indictment of an entire culture comprised of bench-pressing douche bags. I also desperately want this to be Kultgen’s way of satirizing modern chick-lit by demonstrating what the male counterpart to Sex and The City would look like – though there is unfortunately no evidence to support that the author had that broad of a motive (no pun intended).

Instead, I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night, in the introduction to which he warns, “Be careful of what you pretend to be, for that is what you are.” Kultgen may be playing his own literary game here by cleverly mocking modern misconceptions about men, but without tipping his hand before folding, you never know if you’ve been bluffed. What you end up with instead is a crudely written, loosely crafted first novel by either a salient cultural satirist, or every frat boy’s favorite author.