Reviewed by Sona Pai

In the introduction to US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man, Charlie LeDuff cautions readers that, despite its title, his book is not an attempt to crawl inside the brain of the American man. Rather, it is “a conversation with him, a participatory look into his world, an attempt to feel what he feels.”

LeDuff’s quest takes him to a gay rodeo in Oklahoma City, a fight club in Oakland, a horse track in Florida and the Burning Man festival in Nevada. At bars, in rundown apartments, and under a circus tent in the parking lot of a strip mall, he talks to wannabe pro football players, immigrant circus performers, Pentecostal snake-handlers and Little Big Horn re-enactors. There’s no question that what LeDuff does is participatory. He gets his ass handed to him at the fight club. He’s the drag queen at the rodeo. He gets naked and wasted at Burning Man. He has plenty of conversations with the American man, but unfortunately for readers, they’re mostly one-sided.

A reporter for the New York Times, LeDuff calls what he does “hanging-out journalism.” He writes about regular people with regular problems in gonzo prose that’s high-minded, but not too formal for four-letter words or over-the-top machismo. He has a knack for getting insider access to subcultures that don’t grant admission to just anyone, and he’s not afraid to prod, provoke or piss off his subjects. He’s also not afraid to look down on them, make fun of them, or use them to get to what he really wants to talk about: himself.

Over and over again, the reader is forced to look away from the angry biker or the country preacher or the gay bull rider because LeDuff is over there crying or reminiscing or reminding us that he, himself, is definitely not gay. When a local newspaper photographs LeDuff dressed in drag for a story on the gay rodeo, LeDuff laments the fact that the paper used him as a cheap, flamboyant prop rather than offer an insightful portrait of gay life in the heartland—an ironic criticism considering the fact that LeDuff misses the same boat in his treatment. Rather than give his readers some of the depth and detail the newspaper ignored, LeDuff gives us this:

“The funny thing about the photo was that the queer on the steer was Yours Truly. And I’m straight as an arrow. Nobody bothered to ask. If the editors needed any proof of my sexual orientation, they could have easily sent me their unhappy wives and girlfriends and I would return them home with a smile.”

As he shoves himself into the role of protagonist, LeDuff reduces his Everymen to clichés and caricatures: the third-rate football player with a dream, the sad clown, the hung-over pretty boy with a modeling contract. LeDuff is not the immersion journalist who gets to know his subject inside and out. He’s the guy at the bar who buys you a beer, asks you where you’re from, and then talks about himself until last call.

LeDuff is a capable writer, and his work is peppered with vivid scenes and spot-on metaphors, but that isn’t enough to make readers forget that they’ve been tricked into learning more about one American man than about the American man. Just as you can’t judge a book by its title, you can’t judge a man by what he makes in a year or what he says when he’s drunk. You can, however, judge a work of nonfiction by how it treats its subjects and its readers, and in this case, it’s with condescension, contempt, and too often, conceit.