Title: I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Author: Tucker Max Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp. Publish Date: 2006 Pages: 277 Genres:: Memoir, Autobiography, Straight Reviewer: Jerome D'Angelo

Rating:

Just call it, Requiem for a Pseudo-Frat Boy. Meet Tucker Max. By his own admission, he is an asshole. “I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times,” he brags on his website, “disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.”
And goddamn if he ain’t kidding.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is 277 machismo-soaked pages of unapologetic raunch sure to make you laugh, cry and vomit. Without letting up even once throughout the book, Mr. Max recounts every sordid detail of his high school, collegiate and law schools years, sparing neither himself nor anyone involved in the bile-caked yarns he spins so much as one iota of embarrassment. At times, Max’s remembrances read like a pornographic John Waters nightmare; weak stomachs need not apply.

Sex. Drinking. More sex. Drunkenness. Puking. Self-loathing. Sex. And more drinking. And then more sex and puking. Oh, and some occasional feces and joking at the expense of a fat woman.
Assuming that Max’s tales of mischief and mayhem aren’t 100% Grade-A bullshit (he swears everything he writes is completely true except for the names to shield him from possible legal trouble - likely story), we can also assume that his little solipsistic prophecy of a title might just well hold true. If you believe in that sort of thing, anyway.

Max likens his stories to a kind of warning, periodically informing his readers that he hopes they won’t make the same mistakes he did. But much like an old lifer at the state penitentiary telling war stories in the prison yard to the crop of orange-clad new-jacks fresh off the bus, Max may say he’s giving them advice, but all he’s really doing is bragging.

Or perhaps simply blowing back against the “over-feminization of the culture,” says Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, Max's editor. What Tyler Durden was to Jack in Fight Club, so to does Tucker Max attempt to be to all men threatened by things like political correctness and intellect. And much like Durden, Max displays “the raging id of a male toddler”, as the New York Times’ Liesl Schillinger so rightly put it.

Still, Max is certainly a person whose life story needs to be recounted. We’ve never had this kind of insight into the mind of “that guy” ever before. Sure, we’ve all read Naked Lunch and seen Trainspotting, but this book is different. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is a (supposedly) true first person account of the kind of man that would make Gloria Steinem hang herself with her shoelaces were they ever to meet. Social-progressives, intellectuals and feminists alike would do well to heed the words of Tucker Max. Not to emulate him, mind you, but to learn from them. Time was drunken pink-necks (rednecks that went to college) would only have the details of their misogyny and self-importance passed onto others of their ilk, lost to those who thought better of frequenting their circles. Not so here, as Max has truly, in his own unique Red Bull-and Vodka drenched way, given us a real gift.

Know thy enemy, fellow liberals.Don’t let the mediocre star-rating fool you; it is only so low because it’s evident that the author is a seriously vile human being completely unworthy of any sort of praise whatsoever. Having said that, the book itself is important, though no quite how Mr. Max might like to think it is.

As for the author himself, it’s pretty obvious that Max is on self-destruct, and here’s hoping that that button gets pushed sooner rather than later. Read it and you’ll figure out why. Here’s also hoping that, in that eternal/instantaneous moment right before his life functions inevitably cease, it occurs to him that the CEO of Hateies title he seems to think he’s earned will go to someone who’s actually evil, not to someone who’s just loud, drunk and stupid. All things considered, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell should be required reading.