Kent Russell, _I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son_

 KING KONG THEORY could be crudely described as a book about the perils of being born female, and I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son serves to show that being born male is no stroll in the park, either--or at least not for American-born millennials.

Born forty years earlier than he was, Russell might have been a journalist in the Hunter S. Thompson vein, but the demand for that sort of thing has largely evaporated--not that you know that from the Knopf jacket copy that proclaims "a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld." Russell does no trade in fear and loathing, nor does he devote a lot of space to his drug intake. Instead he turns his reportorial attention to the bizarre sorts of things American men elect to do, such as: 

--acquire immunity from snakebites by letting themselves be bitten regularly by poisonous snakes ("Mithridates of Fond du Lac")

--design gory special effects for horror movies ("Say Good Morning to the Adversary")

--become one of professional hockey's "enforcers"--that is, the players who get rough with opposing player attempting to get rough with the team's best scorer ("Showing Up").

The jewel in the crown (and the reason I bought the book) is "American Juggalo," in which Russell attends a Gathering, the annual summer festival for fans of the Insane Clown Posse. As drop-in literary journalism goes, this essay can sustain comparison to Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," about Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, or David Foster Wallace's "Ticket to the Fair," about the Illinois State Fair. Russell is not of the scene, and he has a sense of its absurdities, but he does not want to merely mock it, and he almost kinda sorta gets it. I hope this piece becomes a classic.

(For contrast, like a sweet breeze wafted in from some pastoral Eden, we have "Artisanal Ball," about baseball as played by the Amish.)

What is going on with American men doing such stupid things? Is it because American men have always done stupid things--is this is our legacy from our fathers? The book's title, it turns out, is not something Russell's father said to him, but something Daniel Boone once said to a son who showed no interest in military service. Trying to be what our fathers were, or wanted to be, or  thought they had to be...is that what it is?

Interspersed throughout I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son are essays with dates rather than titles, almost all from September 2013, in which Russell describes a lengthy visit with his own father in Florida. Russell is trying to obtain his father's co-operation for a piece in which Russell will travel to the ancestral home of the Russells, Ohio, to write about the family's history. Dad, fearing his son will annihilate the family in a snark-blast for some snooty national magazine, won't go along. But even though Russell fails in his quest to get Dad up to Ohio, we get a convincing portrait of the man, and incidentally a glimpse into what fathers mean to sons, what sons means to fathers... not to mention a glimpse into a masculinity that is not exactly toxic but nonetheless hard on the liver.