A Raw Voice of Young Manhood Makes a Bid for Literary Respect

LOS ANGELES

ON a recent weekday afternoon, Chad Kultgen, the author of “The Average American Male” and “The Lie,” was sitting in the food court of the Beverly Center mall, sipping a fruit smoothie.

It was hardly a garden table at the Chateau Marmont, but it was in keeping with the aesthetic of Mr. Kultgen’s novels, whose characters spend a great deal of time drifting aimlessly through suburban shopping meccas.

“It’s what I grew up with,” said Mr. Kultgen, 35, who was raised in Texas, but who has lived here since he was a film major at the University of Southern California. “And I feel like most of America is that way. Like this is kind of where life happens: in strip malls and stuff.”

As well as providing Mr. Kultgen’s novels with authenticity, these nondescript backgrounds serve as a kind of lulling, ambient noise against which the outrageous things that his characters think, say and do seem all the more outrageous.

Nowhere more so than in “The Average American Male,” which, since its publication in 2007, has become an unofficial, if somewhat undercover bible for a certain strain of Xbox-playing, Maxim-collecting Gen Y males. (A copy of the book has been circulating among American soldiers serving in the Middle East, Mr. Kultgen said.)

A coming-of-age tale about a protagonist who never really comes of age, the novel (more a collection of vignettes, with chapter titles like “Carlos’ Gay Party”) follows a disaffected twentysomething who divides his time among scouring for online porn, having Kama Sutra-style sex with his girlfriend and playing Halo. With its scathing — and decidedly X-rated — portrayal of What Guys (Apparently) Really Think, it feels like the literary love child of Neil LaBute, Judy Blume and Eminem.

A typical entry involves the book’s nameless protagonist waking up, turning on the television and masturbating “to an episode of Real World vs. Road Rules in which the contestants are involved in a challenge that requires the girls to wear bikinis.”

En route to L.A. Fitness, a local gym, he then fantasizes about “every girl I pass.”

Penthouse called “The Average American Male” “an appalling book we couldn’t put down.” Many female readers were outraged. And most critics were dismissive. (“The Main Event of Portnoy’s Complaint without the wit,” snorted Kirkus.)

But helped by a clever online marking campaign (one promotional video featured a young man’s lewd thoughts as he offered to pay for his date’s dinner), more than 100,000 copies have sold, according to HarperCollins (his second book, “The Lie,” set at a frat-filled Texas college, has sold 40,000 copies), making Mr. Kultgen if not exactly a successor to Gay Talese, certainly a popular phenomenon to be reckoned with.

Now the author, who also writes for film and TV, is making a bid for something a little more hard-won: literary respect. His new novel, “Men, Women and Children” (Harper Perennial), went on sale this week and, by Mr. Kultgen’s own admission, involved more than “just sitting down and being like, ‘Huh, what porn site did I look at today? All right, let me write a chapter about that’ ”— the process, he joked, of writing “The Average American Male.”

“This is certainly a conscious effort to do something a little more substantial,” said Mr. Kultgen, who was dressed unassumingly in a T-shirt and jeans, making him look more like a mild-mannered Hollywood slacker than someone who was once told he was “the Antichrist,” he said, by a female reader.

“I tried to be a little more serious,” he continued. “I think there are a couple funny moments in the book, but certainly nothing like ‘Average American Male.’ ”

Set in a suburban dystopia, “Men, Women and Children” examines the loneliness of a world in which Facebook messaging, texting and chatting online with fellow World of Warcraft players serve as intimate communication. There is plenty of sex (and pornography), but because some of Mr. Kultgen’s subjects are junior high-school students, not legal-age adults, the tone is more darkly unsettling than humorous.

“I don’t know if I really wanted to make a comment on this next generation and how the Internet and text messaging, and all the communication technology that we have, is changing the way we interact,” Mr. Kultgen said. “I didn’t want to actually pass judgment on it. I just wanted to put it out there and say: ‘This is what’s happening. Get used to it.’ ”

Already, there are high-profile fans, including Jason Reitman, the writer and director of “Up in the Air,” who provided a blurb for the book.

In an e-mail, Mr. Reitman said that he became aware of Mr. Kultgen through “The Average American Male,” which he called “beautifully blunt and honest. It was shocking, but not because the content was unfamiliar. It was just a new experience to see those words written down.”

He went on to call the book “the first and only romantic comedy I’ve ever read based on male desire” and said that it was essentially about “what a man wants if given the permission to be honest.”

George (Maddox) Ouzounian, the author of “The Alphabet of Manliness,” whose “fratire” style is often compared to Mr. Kultgen’s, said that Mr. Kultgen “speaks the voice of our generation very authentically. And you rarely see that in the media today.” He said he saw the same truth in the Judd Apatow movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” in which male friends sit around playing video games and talking about sex and women’s bodies.

“That’s exactly what we do,” Mr. Ouzounian said. “But capturing that voice and that feel is very, very rare.”

Some female readers, however, have been less impressed by Mr. Kultgen’s drippingly macho manifestos. On the Web site Feministing, one reader of “The Lie” wrote: “Oh my goodness PLEASE FELLOW FEMINISTS — someone else has to check out the worst book I have ever read in my life.”

The commenter went on to sarcastically describe Mr. Kultgen as “a master of descriptions of spermatozoa.”

And then there is Hilary Winston, who dated Mr. Kultgen for five years and who insists that Casey, the cloying girlfriend in “The Average American Male,” is based on her. (Like Ms. Winston once did, Casey takes comedy classes at The Groundlings and struggles with her weight.)

Unsurprisingly, Ms. Winston said she hated “The Average American Male.” Although she said in a phone interview that Mr. Kultgen is a “great writer,” she finds his books misogynistic.

“The narrator is unnamed, he’s a God-like figure,” said Ms. Winston, a writer for the television series “Community,” who turned her ire toward Mr. Kultgen into a new book of essays called “My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me” (Sterling). “So the idea is that men are God-like figures who use these women who are just there for their disposal, for their own needs.

“When a friend of mine read the line in the book about how he masturbates into his girlfriend’s shampoo bottle, she was like, ‘You almost married this guy?’ ”

Mr. Kultgen denied that any character in “The Average American Male” is based on anyone real.

“As for me being a misogynistic writer,” he said, “my novels include a number of interpretations of attitudes and worldviews that are present in our current culture. Some of them are purposely unflattering.”  He added that he receives plenty of fan mail from female readers who “can kind of identify the Casey character as being something they don’t want to be.” 

Another mistaken assumption, Mr. Kultgen said, is that he shares qualities with his creations. “I had a girlfriend all four years of college,” he said matter-of-factly. “I was not in a frat or anything like that. Certainly, I got drunk every once in a while. I had a semi-normal college experience, I would say, but nothing like chasing girls or anything — absolutely nothing. So maybe it was an abnormal college experience.”

Maybe, he suggested, his characters are exaggerated for effect.

“The guy in ‘Average American Male’ masturbates 10 times a day. I don’t think any guy is really doing that.”

There was a pause, then a coy smile. “Maybe nine times.”