American Bulk

November 15, 2024
The dysfunctional joy of America's indulgences in excess. In her debut collection, New York transplant Mester, her Midwestern roots firmly intact, dissects America's complex relationship with excess through nine loosely connected personal essays. Drawing from her own experiences and those of her family, specifically her father and grandmother, she examines the nation's extreme consumerist psyche, revealing how Middle America's habits mirror broader national trends in overindulgence. From Amazon's one-click convenience to Costco's bulk-buy paradise, from endless Olive Garden breadsticks to the anxieties of overconsumption, Mester paints a vivid portrait of American consumerism. Her trio of "Storm Lake" essays subtly unravel her grandmother's eccentricities, particularly a hoarding compulsion that begins with collecting freebies and ends with Mester confronting an abandoned, cluttered home in Iowa. In "Wholesale," Mester fondly recounts her family's weekly Costco trips. "Nobody ever went to church. Costco was our mass," she writes. For those unfamiliar with the retail giant, she breaks down Costco's business model, its place in the retail landscape, and its customer demographics, but it's through her father's compulsive shopping that she reveals the store's broader appeal: "To people like my dad, Costco offers far more than a good deal. It offers the lulling comfort of permanent volume, the same bulwark against scarcity that draws us to the-all-you-can-eat, the BOGO, the unlimited refill, the family size. The endless, the bottomless, the lifetime guarantee--these promises are not to be underestimated, because their flipside is terrifying. To want a boundless supply means also to acknowledge a boundless need. We are inclined to hunger." Throughout, Mester offers a balanced perspective, blending personal experience with objective analysis. Her cleareyed approach suits the subject matter, though her deadpan style occasionally limits warmth and humor. Despite this, she achieves considerable depth, exploring the complexities of American consumerism with insight and nuance. A thought-provoking view of our relationship with consumption and excess.

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October 14, 2024
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.