American Nerd: The Story of My People
Self-flagellation and guilt are two major personality traits of Geeks. A common thread in our lives is the self-hatred that comes from being told you're different than the other kids - in a bad way. Your glasses or ill-fitting clothes are wrong, your bookish manner of speech unwelcome to other "cooler" kids. We retreat to comfort, to rules and structure in a seemingly chaotic world. Thus is the thesis of Benjamin Nugent's American Nerd: The Story of My People, a book not unlike Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion for its logic and prose. Being a self-proclaimed Alpha Geek, I am always protective of my community. The mainstream view of geeks has classically been a negative one, only recently have we seen the rise of Geek Chic, the ultimate revenge. Our glasses are in style, tight thrift store shirts and beat up clothes are coveted, and our hyper-literate manner of communication welcome to prospective employers. We are, of course, a deeper people than this. We have developed a bond with other Geeks in order to ensure our survival and are protective of the shelter cobbled together with stacks of Monster Manuals and empty jewel cases. We are varied in our interests, tied together by passion alone. Misunderstood passion validated by the niche communities we affiliate ourselves with.
When I saw American Nerd was penned by the same author of Elliot Smith and the Big Nothing, I imagined a sort of Geek ambassador, a man who Knew What He Was Talking About. Elliot Smith being the ultimate Geek, one so tormented by his isolation and obsession with his craft. So misunderstood. His biography sheds insight into his otherwise isolated thoughts, so surely Nugent had the prescient ability to understand geeks, to explain them to the layman. This was a book I wanted so badly to champion. I wanted this to be a manual to understanding nerds that management types could turn to and reference when their software engineers act uncomfortable and reclusive at the company barbecue.
American Nerd excited me immensely when I first started reading it. "He understands!" I would mouth silently to myself on the bus, "He gets it!" I would tell anyone within earshot about how smart it was, how he explained why we act the way we do. I was high on the validation. For the first few chapters, Nugent achieves a Dawkins-like sense of knowing exactly what is in your head, but being more coherent in expressing it. He discusses incredibly interesting and insightful things, like where the word "nerd" comes from, discussing nerds in history and how America's physical education programs were thinly veiled Christian propaganda. He gives anecdotal accounts from his own life of nerdery, along with stories about different groups and subsets of nerds. The LARPers, the Sci-Fi geeks, the D+D nerds, the gamers. Well, the Major League Gaming gamers - the Halo 2 and Super Smash Bros. jocks. Of course being a gamer my ears (eyes?) perked up at my own subset being represented.
Nugent mentions that one major nerd calling card is their obsession with facts that would be deemed unimportant by "normal" standards. Take the pop culture nerd who kicks ass at Jeopardy!, or the Tolkien nerd who wrote their college thesis in Sindarin. Nugent knows these nerds pick through data looking for faults, and still there was a moment in the book when my faith in him as a writer was questioned. I was so enthusiastic about American Nerd up until he got a fact wrong. In the section about gaming, he talks about an MLG Smash Bros team called "Husband and Wife" because they play as Princess Peach and Prince, Peach's husband in the game. This error was compounded for a few different reasons.
- Super Smash Bros is a massively popular game, selling millions of copies. Getting a character name wrong when you are writing a definitive book on the subject of nerds is just asking for trouble.
- Princess Peach is not only a character in Smash Bros, but a billion other Nintendo-themed properties including the most persistent of all properties: Super Mario.
- Peach isn't married, and even if she was, wouldn't she be married to Mario?
- Who the fuck is Prince?
For a self-ascribed Nerd, that is a fairly fundamental fuck up. Didn't he have an editor? Wasn't there someone along the chain of Definitive Nerd Manual Construction do some fact-checking into this? Nugent then proceeded to lead his book directly down the steepest cliff he could find by ending without answering his thesis. By the end of American Nerd you realize Nugent is just talking to himself. He brings up subsets of nerdery and then leaves you hanging, wondering what his point is. While perhaps you could extrapolate your own answers as you glimpse through the tiny windows of this geek culture, any and all credibility is tossed out said windows in the last chapter, where Nugent discusses how he gave up being a nerd. As a teenager.
Wait, if you are writing a book about "Your People", shouldn't you be one of those people? As he leads you into this story of handing his Super Nintendo and collection of games off to a friend and leaving him in the dust, you realize Nugent is really just absolving himself of guilt. It's all about Kenneth, the kid with the bad family life who Nugent feels guilty leaving in his time of need. Kenneth was a dead weight on Nugent's leg, or so he felt at the time. I feel like he's written this book as a sort of dedication to his former friend; a pre-mid-life contemplative look back into his childhood. I would find this bittersweet and poignant if I wasn't led to believe he was an expert on the subject. Didn't he say in the foreword that he was "a little biased", being a nerd himself? But... he's not a nerd after all?
As I read the last few pages and shut the book, I stared out the window of the bus as it puttered through rush hour traffic. As I contemplated this abrupt end and ultimately egocentric diatribe, I couldn't help but feel like Kenneth: abandoned by someone who I thought understood me.
