Nervosities, John Madera’s distinctive and expansive new story collection, may be categorized as postmodern, since much of its reflexive concerns and critique align with post-1968 French philosophical questions, albeit without the pomo fizz and jizz of the 1990s pop-speculative agon. The stories also betray a deep proclivity for the best of Modernism, e.g., formal and stylistic experimentation; focus on the consciousness, isolation, etc., of its characters; exposure of the negative consequences of capitalism, technology, etc. Further complicating matters, they also offer the delights of well-crafted Realism, a refurbished and “untimely” (in the best Nietzschean sense) version of the genre that understands and at times exploits what it knows of its limitations. In other words, Nervosities is both elliptical as well as uncannily familiar.
Like John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, every story in Nervosities is so stylistically different from each other, almost as if each one had a different author. And while there are echoes of possible exemplars, whether Jorge Luis Borges, Henry James, and Martin Amis, or even Wallace Stevens, the singular subterranean provocateur, Madera, is always there with us, threatening to topple our languaged worlds and tear them to smithereens. But instead of mere destruction, each crack-up in Nervosities erupts into something new, unthought of until that moment of surrender, when you realize what you thought was the world is not the world you had thought it was.
All of his characters are geniuses, but that is only language speaking, and it is Madera’s—how should we say it, not mere knack or proficiency—but an unnameable relationship with language that casts our attention across multiple fields. At times, we may detect a likeness to the aforementioned James, Borges, Amis, or Stevens, though identity—both with regard to character and narrator—is a secondary matter here to the event, to the flood of experience.
As for Madera’s characters, they are appearances and disappearances, assemblages along the tidal flow of living subjectivity, yes, but also assemblages of the heart. Not coming across as coldly constructed, each character comes alive, their experience beating through us, catalyzing our sympathies, caressing and careening us with their believability. In “Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs,” an unnamed narrator intones:
I wanted to understand everything that I saw from a kind of Archimedean remove, but this was impossible. My tendency was to list things, to name them, to enumerate them, to order them in order to understand them, but I was learning that the most important part of anything said is the part that is not there at all: what is left unsaid, what is, perhaps, unsayable.
He seems to be embarked on a kind of religious quest—or perhaps a demolition of the self—through Varanasi, the holy city along the sacred Ganges River, but his words could very well reveal Madera’s overall project, that is, that storytelling is always at best a failure at understanding, and that the best you can do is circumambulate around what may be called the “real,” or attempt a feeling for its topography. Tragedies abound in this story: bombs go off, lives are spent, temples toppled, and blood is everywhere; and the city is shut down, not unlike the experience of many of us during the COVID-19 pandemic. It may be possible to itemize individual things, as in the story’s lists of produce, the “piles of potatoes, brainy cauliflowers, unraveling cabbages, nosey carrots, phallic cucumbers …” but the world as a whole is seemingly impossible to determine precisely. Always in flux, always becoming, the event itself is nevertheless unnamable, unsayable.
For those aware of Madera’s online journal, Big Other, and who may otherwise follow Madera in social media, it’s no mystery that he is a proponent of the philosophical and “schizoanalytical” work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It’s not so much that Madera follows the work as a passive consumer might, but instead shares an affinity with how they appraise the world in language. Like these philosophers, he foregrounds flux and becoming as intimate to experience, what he unsays throughout Nervosities demonstrating a rare compellingness that is oftimes surprising, if not astonishing.
Madera accomplishes this through a broad and able stylistic range. Daring to tread regions typically identified with the abovementioned Amis, James, and Stevens, not to mention László Krasznahorkai, to name a few, Madera comes across not as an imitator, but always as very much himself, with ample chops and an amoebic mutability to reshape himself as the needs of his vision and content of the event determine. Achieved with impressive technical skill, the stories demonstrate profound empathy for its characters, many of whom are damaged, at their wit’s end, edging toward some precipice or another. There are surges of the misunderstood, destructive or self-destructive, widowed, bereaved, homeless, unjustly imprisoned, all nomadic souls wandering and attempting to make sense of the varied disaster sites of their lives. And it is their singular modes of assessing their experience that animate these stories, each of which have own their distinctive vibrance.
Madera is not serving “slices of life” but enduring fields where particular lives are warped, devoured, or otherwise transformed by a flood of situations producing other floods of situations. What we get here are moments of refraction rather than reflection, as reflective surfaces mistell the truth in their numerous minute distortions. Madera doesn’t offer us distorted worlds, or the one true one, but a panoply of possible worlds that we can occupy serially or in parallel. Moreover, these are our possibilities we are reading, our experiences we are experiencing. We don’t have Joyce’s Dublin or the like standing in for the world. Instead, we have an entirety of the global world standing in for whatever house, palace, box, or hovel we may occupy.
The nomadic narrator of “Reflections of a Ruined Wingspan”—referred to at times as “Monstruo”—ends up dog-sitting for friends of friends in their New York City apartment. He has an occasional roommate, an elderly homeless man who shows up now and then when not off spending his social security check on a crack bender. Both are displaced and aimless, Monstruo because of a family tragedy of his own. As his stay nears an end, there is an unexpected delay in the owners of the apartment returning. He is left somewhat luckily in a state of suspension, most of his friends and family having dispersed for one reason or another. Attempting to explain something to his remaining friend, he is unable to find the words. Later, he conveys his feelings to us:
Sometimes it feels like you have been entrusted with beauty, ruins, truths, lies, mysteries, horrors, then required to hide them away, absorb them into your body until they are ready to be vomited up, your blood and guts smeared all over the necessary mess. But this is not what I wanted to say.
Words appeared on my subsidized mobile: the abovementioned last of my crew, asking if I had finally “landed on my feet” (his words). No, I had not—I was flying.
For all of its ambiguities and uncertainties, Nervosities, which foregrounds the creative and otherwise generative possibilities of language and meaning-making, also extends a hand, and a place of recognition or a homebase, for those of us “in flight,” in the physical, mental, or spiritual sense. Finishing Nervosities, I’m left with the sense that John Madera will continually offer a helping hand, perhaps even newer and enervating “lines of flight,” to a growing number of the lost, the travelers and disenfranchised, who are both the products and victims of late capitalism even as it itself transforms in unknowable ways.
Nervosities, by John Madera. Anti-Oedipus Press, May 2024. 206 pages. $18.95, paper.
John Schertzer is the author of the novel Bellamonia and a poetry collection, Second Nature. His poems, fictions, and hybrids have been published in Big Other, Inverted Syntax, The Germ, American Letters & Commentary, 1913 Journal, The Cortland Review, La Petite Zine, Danse Macabre, LIT, and other journals.
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