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he nameless protagonist of Chad Kultgen's The Average American Male is a thirtysomething L.A. bachelor who, outwardly, plays the role expected of modern men: he's sensitive, empathetic, a good listener. In reality, he spends most of his time thinking up ways to get sex from women, whom he considers to be needy, vapid and across-the-board annoying. He has a girlfriend, Casey, who believes they will someday get married; he intends to dump her when the next hot chick will have him. Until then, he spikes her Diet Cokes with breast-augmenting drugs, tells her he loves her so she'll give him blowjobs and promises to marry her whenever she seems doubtful.

Published this month by Harper Perennial, The Average American Male is the latest release in the normally tedious "how men really think" genre. But the lad-lit boomlet of a few seasons back (Love Monkey, Booty Nomad, Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor) reads like Chicken Soup for the Male Soul in comparison. Kultgen's book declares full-blown war on the very idea of long-term relationships, which his narrator considers soul-sucking deathtraps that ruin men's lives. It's not the most revolutionary idea — guys have been good-humoredly kicking around the topic of the old ball-and-chain for

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decades — but Kultgen is not remotely joking around. "I wanted to write something about the attitude about women, about relationships, that I know a lot of my friends have," he says.

The narrator's thoughts are detailed journalistically. A day begins: "I get dressed and go to the gym. On my way there, I imagine fucking every girl I pass. I imagine some of them sucking my cock before I fuck them." A day ends: "Casey cums. I'm not even close and I'm incredibly bored so I fake it, look her in the eyes, say, 'I love you,' kiss her forehead, wait until she falls asleep, go in the bathroom and jerk off to memories of the girl I butt-fucked a few hours earlier." These Clockwork Orangey streams of consciousness comprise page after page. At a bar, he meets a girl with a harelip: "I wonder if she's had to develop some super cocksucking technique to compensate for her deformity. I wonder if she can even suck cock at all. I picture myself fucking her in the ass and her genuinely enjoying it because she has to, because she knows that her openness to things other women aren't is the most and only attractive quality she has."

"I like to think that, to some degree, all of that goes on in every guy's head," says Kultgen, thirty, a film-school graduate who moved to Los Angeles to write for TV and movies, an aspiration that has yet to be fully realized. "In contemporary media, the representation of guys my age, myself, all my friends included — it just wasn't accurate."

Already, The Average American Male has generated a cover-blurb comparison to Rabbit, Run, John Updike's 1960 commentary on men, marriage, sexual passion, and how the three conspire to destroy each other. Kultgen's book is worlds cruder than Rabbit, Run — the writing seems intentionally amateurish, and the plot is thinner than a Trojan Ultra-Sensitive. But critics also hated Rabbit, Run upon its original release, claiming that American men couldn't possibly think so selfishly. Half a century later, it's widely recognized that Updike tapped into a part of the male mindset that is rarely addressed, even today: an id-based, nihilistic attitude toward sex and relationships that comes from feeling trapped by women.

"I think guys know they have to keep [this mentality] in check," says Kultgen. "Not necessarily deny it, but hide it from women they're dating. If people get mad

Chad Kultgen

about the book, I hope they get really mad. If they like it, I hope they really like it. The best-case scenario is that it opens up some kind of conversation about relationships."

Recently, many authors within the "fratire" genre — such as Tucker Max, Neil Strauss and George "Maddox" Ouzounian — have capitalized on this. But Kultgen's protagonist doesn't come across like a party animal or a player; he doesn't seem to have read The Game, Strauss's how-to-score-chicks manual. Instead, he seems to be sociopath whose view of the world is so nihilistic that The Game would seem trite and pointless to him. Despite his driftless life, in a weird way, he seems to be a thinker (the way cynical people usually do).

Kultgen, on the other hand, seems mystified when I tell him that the book reads like a kind of manifesto, or at the very least a declaration of outrage, like a fictional male version of Valerie Solanas's S.C.U.M. "Oh Jesus Christ, I'm a dead man!" he responds. "My agent was telling me that there are a couple of other books that are in this arena of guy-centric whatever, and they've been doing pretty well. Obviously I want people to buy it and read it and like it. I don't want too many people to be mad. I hope people enjoy it, and I hope Oprah doesn't read it."

The Average American Male might seem simplistic to a point, putting men in the purely crazy-sexual category, and women in the purely deluded-monogamous category. But talking to Kultgen, you get the feeling he doesn't think the sexes are much more complicated than that. "I think the guys of our generation have different values," he says. "I think women probably do, too. It seems like more women want to get married than guys, and guys just kind of accept it. We live in a place where that's kind of accepted." (Such as Mars, where men are from? And Venus, where the womenfolk reside?)

The book's essential reductiveness could be traced back to its inspiration: as a reaction to sitcom characters. Coming of age in the '90s, Kultgen says he was frustrated by shows like Home Improvement, in which the men were portrayed as "stupid, oafish, with the wife who really knows what's going on. If you look at any network sitcom, it's the fat guy with the sassy wife, and all he wants is, 'Please honey, can't I just drink some beers and watch football with the guys?' And she's like, 'If you don't take me to the opera, you're not getting any sex!' Who thinks that's funny or can relate to it? Maybe some people can, but I couldn't."

But does the counter-argument work in literary form? Kultgen's writing reflects his work history — the story is often funny and moves briskly — but the sitcom-style prose obscures the impressive fact that Kultgen goes beyond the fear-of-commitment story that's been pushed a thousand times (High Fidelity, Garden State, etc.) He rightly posits that if guys fear commitment, there's a reason, and that reason might be that they can't relate to the women they pursue. This scares them, because eventually they're expected to marry one. So they devolve into jadedness and cynicism as they approach marrying age, dating women whom they're just not that into, feeling increasingly alienated and trapped, until they begin to loathe women in general.

A number of reviewers on Amazon.com praise Kultgen — and not just men. "We think every girl out there who's

Kultgen goes beyond the fear-of-commitment story that's been pushed a thousand times. He rightly posits that if guys fear commitment, there's a reason.

single should read it," states a female reviewer, who claims to speak for her friends too. "This book sounds like the truth."

It has also, predictably, generated a critical brick-shitting. Publishers Weekly called it a "dismal debut. Despite the book's purported 'brutal honesty,' the premise is essentially: guys like sex and dislike cuddling." Kirkus described it as "The Main Event of Portnoy's Complaint, without the wit." But Penthouse called it "an appalling book we couldn't put down," Josh Kilmer-Purcell dubbed it "ingenious," and Toby Young labeled it "a brilliant send-up of the way the male point of view has been misrepresented by militant feminists." Maddox, with typical eloquence, declared it "a blueprint of how the mind — and penis — of a typical American male works." (HarperCollins solicited a Tucker Max plug for the jacket, apparently forgetting they rejected a similar manuscript from him five years ago; he posted their solicitation and his very amusing response on his blog).

But are Kultgen's defenders giving him too much credit? Did he truly intend to expose what's behind men's fear of commitment, or deliver "a brilliant send-up of militant feminists"? Maybe "this is what my friends and I think" is all the book needs to be. Even Kultgen's own girlfriend's opinion is desultory: "She thought it was pretty funny," he says. "She thinks it's good."

The book's original acquiring editor was actually a woman, Joelle Yudin, who solicited Tucker Max for the jacket quote and has since left HarperCollins. The book's current editor, David Roth-Ey, says the acquisition was "hotly debated. Some people loved it, some people loathed it. No one was unmoved." As he read the manuscript at home, he threw the pages in the garbage as he read them so his wife wouldn't find it in the house.

And though the book seems jerry-rigged to spark controversy, "The print reviews have been virtually non-existent," says Roth-Ey. "People have completely ignored it, and I think that's because of the content." He adds: "We're targeting people who read one book a year."

The book was optioned by Showtime before it was even printed, and Kultgen wrote a pilot that was deemed too explicit. "There were several notes about, 'All this guy ever thinks about is sex. Can't we change that?'" he says. So Kultgen happied-up the treatment, turned it in and was shut out of the process. The network wrote its own pilot, then killed the show entirely.

Maybe this is where Kultgen's cynicism comes from. "It's kind of a bleak outlook," he says. "But ultimately that realization that it's all the same, that it doesn't really matter if you live in L.A. or Dallas, or if you pick this chick or that chick, in the end it will all be the same."  

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Will Doig writes for all sorts of fabulous and exciting magazines. He was
raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Today he lives in Brooklyn.