The Saint Rose Chronicle

Issue date: 10/14/09 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: www.danielnester.com

Saint Rose English Department Professor Daniel Nester's hilarious "How To Be Inappropriate" hit Indie bookstore shelves recently. The front cover sums up what Nester's third book is all about: a picture of a thumb poking through the fly of a tweed suit. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words-or, in this case, 260 pages.

Danielnester.com describes the book as follows: "Arguments, lists, barstool rants, queries, pedantic footnotes, play scripts, commonplace miscellany, profiles, and overly revealing memoirettes, How to Be Inappropriate adds up to the portrait of a twenty-something-become-thirty-something, bachelor-become husband, boy-man-about-town who bumbles through life obsessed with one thing: extreme impropriety."

Agreed.

How To Be Inappropriate covers a broad range of topics, from a thorough and well-constructed Period Table of Mooning, to an interview with a video-game aficionado, to a reworked interview with a robotic version of KISS's Gene Simmons, to a serious meditation on the process trying to conceive a child trough In-Vitro Fertilization. And everything in-between.

Nester treats every one of his varied subject matters with the appropriate (or should I say, inappropriate?) level of tongue-in-cheek humor. He makes fun of himself and his life choices at every turn of the page, but somehow, by the end of the book, readers won't find themselves pitying him. Rather, he'll leave them impressed: with his honesty, the diversity of his interest, and his ability to make them laugh at inappropriate things.

This is lit-wit, the kind that appeals to people more the larger their vocabularies are, but still isn't lost on those who don't tote the dictionary along in their messenger bags. His subject matter is personal, and individual: living with a girl who doused a statue of the Virgin Mary in black paint with red eyes; re-enacting the plight of the New York Poet; and experiencing the unique perspective of English as a Second Language students who found only the swear words in Catcher in the Rye comprehensible, to name a few. Still, Nester manages to spin it in a way that readers can not only find funny, but in some cases, sympathize with. Failed attempts at rock stardom, crises related to religious identity, and the pain of general nerdiness all play a part in a collection of essays and tales that is, ultimately, more than the sum of its parts. As with any book like this, where readers get a glimpse into the author's very personal life, it's got a voyeuristic quality that makes it hard to put down. Reading it makes a person feel like they know Dan Nester inappropriately well.


Final Grade: 4.5 stars

Amusing and well-put
together, and very, very
inappropriate. The only drawback is the lit-wit aspect: some language may require a run to the dictionary for some, but the majority is readable, enjoyable and freaking hilarious.

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