BOOKS: American Nerd, Benjamin Nugent (2008)

Nugent gives us an entertaining social history of nerds in America, a group he understands well; the subtitle of this book is "The Story of My People."

What is a nerd? Nugent contends that nerds are disproportionately male, and that they are socially awkward, intellectual boys/men, often in ways that vaguely remind others of machines (speech that's more formal than usual, preference for logic over emotional confrontation, fondness for machines, and so on.)

There are hints of the nerd in literature going back two centuries or more. Nugent claims Victor Frankenstein as an ur-nerd, and offers Mary Bennet (from Pride and Prejudice) as a rare example of the female nerd in literature.

But the nerd as we know him doesn't really become a cultural icon until the twentieth century. In order to trace the history of the nerd, Nugent first offers a brief history of the jock; the nerd in his purest sense, after all, is an oppositional figure, and where there is no jock, there can be no nerd. The jock as we know him, in Nugent's telling, can be traced back to the "muscular Christianity" movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and to the "nineteenth-century Harry Potter," Tom Brown's School Days, a British boarding school novel whose hero was the prototype for generations of ultra-popular, athletic young men.

By the 1940s, the nerd was a stock character in radio shows like Our Miss Brooks; by the 1950s, he's such a common figure that he finally needs a name, and the word "nerd" is born.

Nugent explores the role of the nerd in society, visiting meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism and the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society; and examines his own nerdly past as a high-school debater and gamer (Dungeons and Dragons provided a social outlet for countless nerds). He considers the overlap between the behaviors we associate with nerds and those we associate with various disorders on the autism spectrum.

(I was particularly intrigued by a throwaway notion in this chapter. To what extent, Nugent wonders, is the rise in diagnosis of autism disorders in boys a reflection of our changing expectations for male behavior? One of the hallmarks of, for instance, Asperger's Syndrome is a difficulty in showing or expressing empathy. Fifty years ago, empathy was not necessarily an expected part of the male behavioral package; try, if you will, to conceive of any circumstance that would lead to Dwight Eisenhower uttering the words "I feel your pain." But today, men and boys are expected to be just as empathetic as girls and women, so when they're not, we notice it, and we diagnose it as an illness instead of writing it off as typical male behavior.)

American Nerd is a lively and entertaining book, in which Nugent lays his own nerdly flaws on the line, asking us (and himself) to consider whether they're really flaws at all. He has a keen ear for conversation, and a fine eye for the telling detail. Highly recommended.