But for the most part, my hope was that this would be transportative-that it would transport people back to this time, as opposed to transformative, where we completely alter their understanding of the past. Some of the things in the ’90s, I do make a clear connection to what is happening now. So what I tried to do is go back and see how things were being analyzed at the time, and then compare it to my understanding of how those conditions actually unspooled. They see the previous version of themselves as just a younger version of the person they are now, and that’s never accurate. All people, myself included, are trapped in the mindset that they currently possess when discussing their past or ideas about the past. It allows you to basically keep the way you think, and selectively apply it to this distant period where literally everything else about the world was different. It’s just easier for the person doing it. I think people think it’s more sophisticated to look at the past and then dissect it or reconstruct it through our present tense understanding of how the world thinks. But they only feel that way because they weren’t there.

People now simply cannot fathom how he could have been supported the way he was, that his numbers would actually go up. I felt this most strongly in the Clinton chapter. Sure, anyone could have made that movie … but no one would have done it the way Lynch did. Consider it almost like David Lynch’s famous excursion into heartwarming Disney fare with The Straight Story.

The result is a book that has less Klosterman in it than any of his previous works, but in a way that will please longtime fans as well as newbies and skeptics. The point is not how Klosterman personally recalls the ’90s, but to take the decade on its own terms, less a defense of the decade than a fair assessment. The book, Klosterman’s 12 th, has fewer flights of fancy and arch hypotheticals by design, it’s much more straightforward and matter-of-fact.

The Nineties is much more high-concept than the typical Klosterman book: It’s his attempt to assess a whole decade from the inside out, focusing more on how the decade was actually experienced than how, 22 years later, we’ve decided we want to remember it. “There are many people who could have done a book like this,” Klosterman says, and there’s an element of truth to that. But one person who absolutely does not think that is Chuck Klosterman. It’s tempting to say that The Nineties is the book that Chuck Klosterman, Generation X’s definitive chronicler of culture, music and digressive footnotes for nearly two decades now, was born to write.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman