Book Review: American Bulk: Essays on Excess, by Emily Mester

AMERICAN BULK: Essays on Excess, by Emily MesterWe have reached peak feedback.The customer is not only always right, but always writing, rating.

The bank, the phone company and the hospital want us to evaluate our experiences with them on a scale of 1 to 10.There are Yelp reviews of Planet Earth.The constant assessment of daily life is among the all-too-familiar but strange developments scrutinized by Emily Mester in her unsettling first book, a collection of personal essays about consumption called, in contrast to its slimness, “American Bulk.” Even at the grave, she notes, buyers are weighing in on the many choices of coffin: “One wrote ominously ‘I will purchase again.’”Writing as the alter ego “Em” — folksy or menacing, depending on how you squint — Mester herself used to post online reviews of scratchy throw pillows, bad haircuts, a mean history teacher, until a restaurant owner responded to explain the human struggle behind a disappointing burrito.Looking for confirmation of her choices begins to seem, as the young ’uns say, sus.

“In my attempts to reduce the frictions between me and certain objects,” Mester writes, “I’d multiplied the frictions that invariably remained.If I believed there was a best body wash, I had to fear the worst.”Death by synthetic fruit scent?“American Bulk” is framed by Mester’s family dynamic, all roads leading to Storm Lake, Iowa, the longtime home to her paternal grandmother — an English teacher and champion tightwad — who collected freebies eventually to the point of hoarding, and finding the sameness in places including South Carolina and New York City, where the author now lives.

Another towering figure in the book is her father, a MAGA Republican and successful lawyer who used to take his five children to Costco instead of church on Sundays.“Chain restaurants are soothing,” Mester theorizes, “because they are the same everywhere, like hymns.”Her worship of junk food as a teen...