There is something inherently ridiculous about Kevin Killian’s posthumously published Selected Amazon Reviews. The book takes great pains to show it is very aware of this and to make sure the reader is just as aware. It is evident right there on its cover, puckishly aping the Library of America’s canonical majesty. It continues beneath it, with Wayne Koestenbaum, that doyen of highbrow poptimists, and Dodie Bellamy, an author and Killian’s wife, giving well-theorized answers as to why. Why spend the last 15 years of one’s life, as Killian did, reviewing anything and everything on Amazon? Why publish a fraction of them in book form, let alone in the fine-china quality of Semiotext(e)? Why read them at all?
Selected Amazon Reviews is not the first printed collection of online marginalia. Though the genre is itself rather marginal. Who, besides everyone, can forget the book of Tao Lin tweets? Or Dave Hickey’s Facebook comments? Yet, those and other collections have not been made with this level of grandeur — ironic or sincere. Killian was a more niche author than the former two. Dwelling in the Bay Area “new narrative” scene, he published novels, plays, poetry, erotic fiction, and professional criticism. Through Amazon, however, Killian embraced, in Koestenbaum’s words, “A zine mentality, … and thereby shoves the gatekeepers off their throne.” (I thought gatekeepers were sentinels, not kings.) Bellamy offers more context, conveying their therapeutic value in Killian’s recovery from a heart attack in 2003, but comes to a similarly subversive conclusion. Killian “rejoiced in the not useful ratings his reviews received. To rank cultural production according to its use value is to deflate its mystery.”
There’s something comfortably predigital in those framings, where self-publishing is more disreputable and, therefore, more “radical,” and criticism more authoritative. They are, however, a galaxy away from the style and attitude of Killian’s reviews, which have a more digital-age fondness for free-association and spontaneity, for an almost compulsive erudition, a catholicity of taste and an orgiastic range of interests. Completely written in prose unburdened from theoretical axioms (or at least by a need to stop and kowtow to them) and editorial strictures. They are enlivened with warm humor and a natural faculty for weaving exposition with anecdotes. It is enough to tempt regular critics to wave the white flag, while the reader may simply answer every “Why?” with “Why not?”
That style acts as a kind of adhesive as Killian’s mind leaps unbounded through Amazon’s endless inventory. Editors Hedi E. Kohlti and Robert Dewhurst write of confronting “an embarrassment of riches” in creating the book. Killian’s efforts comprised nearly 2,400 reviews, from which they “selected” over 600 pages worth stretching between 2004 and 2019. The index of names, 26 pages of small type on which I was dependent in lieu of a table of contents, is a testament both to his breadth and to his allusive faculty. This is made more apparent by the book’s chronological organization. On April 6, 2007, Killian posted a review of Tiger Traits, a self-help book based around Tiger Woods. Six days later, he expounded on Stephane Mallarme’s Divagations. A review of the 2002 Celebration Barbie, posted Sept. 26, 2008, is sandwiched between 2001: A Space Odyssey the same day and Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse three days later.
The operative crux of Killian’s voice is in his understanding of the review as a pure form. There are no plumbing of depths or vision quests for nuance, as you’d find in criticism. As with the poet, the reviewer is mindful of the meter. The neat summary, the snap judgment, and the keen eye for the telling detail are brought to bear within an elegant gift box of conversational prose. The review is providing a service while also being, very briefly, your friend.
This balance is struck throughout the pithy enthusiasm of Selected Amazon Reviews.
“It’s plain above all else,” Killian writes in his review of Gone Girl, “that Missouri really is an awful place to grow up in and an even worse place to return to. The burghers of Missouri must have photos of Gillian Flynn posted next to every cash register reading simply ‘Shoot on Sight.’”
A review of the 2004 American-audience remake of The Grudge allows for Killian’s extended tribute to Grace Zabriskie, who has a minor role: “She attacks the part as though she were playing Gertrude in Hamlet (which she is in a way). Watch her as she turns white, and her struggles for breath, and her anguished pleas to Sarah Michelle Gellar.”
Reviewing a throwaway cash-in, The Tinkerbell Hilton Diaries: My Life Tailing Paris Hilton, Killian finds an unusual echo: “Virginia Woolf wrote Flush on much the same grounds, she wanted to paint a picture of a famous person (in her case Elizabeth Barrett Browning) from the point of view of her kidnapped dog.”
It’s easy to see how some Amazon customers would mark his reviews down as “not useful.” Killian’s reviews of less high-minded works or consumer products take the experience portion of “user experience” to new but very witty extremes. Indeed, these reviews are occasions for personal anecdotes of droll domestic observation reminiscent of Robert Benchley or Shirley Jackson.
“My kids were asking why our apartment doesn’t have its own brass sign outside like all the other apartments,” Killian opens a product review. “I know what it’s like to be a kid and to be ashamed of one’s parents for not providing one’s family with something it seems all the other kids have. And so, when I noticed that they were crying themselves to sleep over this over this issue, and that in the morning their pillowcases were wet with tears, I resolved to do something about it, so I ordered a few ultra slim 260 H02 sheets of brass from Amazon and decided to make myself a sign for ‘The Killians.'”
A reader is prone to lose days of their life and pounds off their body mining for these gems. The sum total serves as a public diary of American consumerism at the start of a new century. It has a broadly Nabokov-in-exile air to it, as if Humbert Humbert were wiped of all his neuroses and demonic grandiloquence but not the unceasing inner monologue and hypersensitivity to his surroundings.
Yet that very refinement is also the source of the book’s core weakness. The editors note that a lot of polishing went into the project, finding and fixing the array of typos and other errors that come with transferring language from your brain straight to an online interface. Those should have been left as written. Not because it is more authentic but because the interesting mind at work is only one part of the enterprise; the interesting mind filtering his interesting and elegant thoughts through the crude filter of the digital medium is the other. The internet has granted an unfathomable freedom to all thinking people, which has come with a cost of vulgarized communication and subsuming of individual cultural experience to a mass one. Moreover, the gatekeepers have surrendered their posts, and everyone is self-publishing. It is an anarchy in which it is easy to be suffocated under an ever-growing mountain of content, not to mention products.
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Killian’s forays into Amazon are a testament to how you may stay above the heap, carefully sifting through one item at a time.
Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His X handle is @cr_morgan.