American Bulk: Essays on Excess

Mester blends memoir and cultural criticism to investigate “privileged accumulation,” both within her family and across American culture, in her unfocused debut. In nine wry, disaffected first-person essays, Mester writes of her frugal grandmother’s hoarding, her wealthy father’s compulsive shopping, and well-covered emblems of contemporary consumption including Costco and Yelp. Throughout, she lands pithy punches (“Other chains were cheap in both cost and aesthetics.... Olive Garden, on the other hand, took its mediocrity seriously”) that stop short of trenchant, owing, in part, to the book’s stubborn lack of an overarching argument. “Live, Laugh, Lose” is a vivid account of Mester’s time attending a Pennsylvania fat camp that grows more diffuse as it goes, resisting, in the end, either endorsement or condemnation of the program. “While Supplies Last” first attempts to analyze the allure of sweepstakes, then swerves into an undercooked assessment of mall-induced malaise, before ending with a rhetorical shrug. On a sentence level, Mester writes with considerable skill: the collection’s final essay, “Storm Lake, Part 3,” in which she travels to her grandmother’s long-abandoned Iowa home to find its mess eerily intact, brims with memorable imagery. Still, her observations cry out for a firmer organizing principle. While occasionally stirring, this lands with a whimper. (Nov.)