American consumers have been a subject of public scorn, political courtship, market analysis, and journalistic investigation. As a faceless demographic, their habits have seemed to mystify, and even disgust, those who study their preferences, their predictability, their pathology. But in American Bulk: Essays on Excess, Emily Mester takes a more compassionate route through the labyrinth of brand-name overabundance and the pantheon of casual dining chains.
Throughout these 10 inquisitive and deeply observed pieces, Mester is frank about the privilege that raised her. Her parents and her grandparents built significant wealth through dedication and hard work, raising a banner of money over her that distorted her sense of need. "I feared being broke the way you fear death in a video game." Like her father, she received an elite East Coast education, but having descended from a long line of humble Midwesterners, she quickly noticed a striking difference about the "windblown, affable... ease" of old money. "My classmates and I had almost exactly the same things, but there, with my nose pressed up against the glass, I saw that they had something else": pedigree.
Still, the burning question of American Bulk is not necessarily concerned with striving for status. In a trilogy of essays about her grandmother's home in Storm Lake, Iowa, Mester ruminates poignantly on the animosity between her lavish spender of a father and his frugal and hoarding mother, who battle like the lost souls in Dante's circle of hell dedicated to the greedy: "They think that they clash because they're opposites. But the impulses that drive them are exactly the same." Nonetheless, a product of her upbringing like many Americans, Mester's gaze through the glass seems preoccupied with neither extravagance nor miserliness, but the very impulse itself to consume. "It wasn't the things that I loved so much as the transaction, the beep of the buttons, the receipt paper smooth between my thumb and forefinger."
From this vantage, American Bulk presents an affable and humble study of the senses that consumption can satisfy ("I would've lived there if I could, inside the getting....") and the ones it can't ("When you ask for ease, comfort, and stability and receive it in enormous quantities, you are then left to wonder whether you even wanted it in the first place. Then you must find new things to want.") In a late-stage capitalism heaving with choice, Mester assumes the role of a millennial Virgil with both style and grace. --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: With 10 essays, Emily Mester forges a compassionate route through brand-name overabundance to better understand the impulse to consume.