A Review of Nervosities by John Madera – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Ian S. Maloney

Nervosities
By John Madera
Anti-Oedipus Press
ISBN: 979-8986547930, May 2024

The stories in John Madera’s Nervosities take readers on a journey of dislocation, to explore narrative consciousness and the richness of fictional fragmentation.  From the very opening story “Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequitars,” we travel with the narrator to Varanasi into a world of potentially hostile landscapes and emotional distances:

Think of me as a pilgrim—why not?—but not one with tinkling bells, lighting candles or incense, clapping hands to wake up a god; not a seeker of relics, of transcendence, of release from earthly indignities, but as one contemplating the calamity of his life, one regarding ancient ruins as mirrors of his own rubble; or, instead as a man with an unclean spirit like one of those biblical unfortunates wandering around vacant spaces, seeking solace and never finding it; an extinguished man; or perhaps as a man in pain seeking a cure for an illness he knows there is no cure for because what can cure nothing when something, no, countless somethings were the cause of that nothing? (16)

An extinguished man. That phrase stuck with me. Madera’s book emphasizes a different kind of narrative pilgrim. Instead of a traveler headed out in search of a story, as Phil Cousineau writes in The Art of Pilgrimage: the journey “as nature’s pattern of regeneration, a journey consisting of departure, arrival, and return,” Madera’s narrators grapple with a perpetual sense of being adrift and often exhausted and burnt by the post-industrial world. These stories are about diasporas, transformations, fragmentations, and layers of meaning. These voices aren’t pilgrims in a traditional sense.  They’re more akin to those exploring fluid boundaries and seeking something more in an age of mediazation and cultural displacement.  Much of Nervosities seems underpinned by the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly the concept of the rhizome: namely, connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, a-signifying rupture, and openness to asymmetrical structure and reorganization.

In “A Later Voyager’s Summer Excursus,” we follow Chris Columbus, ironically named by his parents for the explorer and derided for on childhood playgrounds, as he takes a job in Miami at the “Explorers of the New World” theme park in Florida.  The story humorously casts Chris’s transformation through dental work and buttocks augmentation, as he moves from videogame player, to nursing student, to actor, to cosmetic surgery addict. During the story, we learn about Chris’s relationship with Jonah, a performer he met at a variety show. It’s this relationship that hangs over the story. While Jonah seems to save Chris from “self-abnegation” or a Pentecostal euphoria, as he terms it, there’s a tint of sadness which arises throughout the story. In a funny scene towards the end, the aptly named manager of the theme park Jim Falwell twists himself in knots noting that Chris is black. And in their estimation, Chris Columbus is white. Chris then gets asked to be Pedro Alonzo Nino from the Nina. I loved the humor of the exchanges throughout the story, as Chris metaphorically heads south to play an explorer in an absurdist explorer theme park and winds up debating surface-level accuracy concerning the deeply ambiguous moral inner character of Columbus. Madera captures the irony surrounding appearances in the United States here and lack of depth, and his satire ends with a biting bit of phone conversation between Chris and Jonah from a hotel room.

“It was a trip,” Chris said. “And to think I just got paid to stand around on a fake boat,while wearing a girdle and pantyhose,” his laughter mixing into Jonah’s. having theeffect of thinning out their ever-spreading malaise which, at least for a few seconds,crowded out Chris’s doubts about their situation.” (105-106)

The story seemed a fitting satire for the country itself, as we playact the past and take on absurd role-playing, trying to ignore the persistent malaise, unreality, and unease settling in all around us.

In one of my favorite stories from the collection, “An Incommodious Vehicle,” the narrator focuses on our central character Paternoster. Paternoster is described as a Bedford-Stuyvesant couch-surfer, who lets us know he’s headed for a fall early in the story. Paternoster has dubbed himself the “Marginal Man” as he refuses to move forward from his “paralysis” which seems to echo Joycean characters in Dubliners. When Paternoster meets Katya (from St. Petersburg) at a local poetry reading, the story seems to shift gears. As they travel to a dive bar in Coney Island, Paternoster rails against lack of precision in words, when he hears Katya is “seeing someone.”  His humorous diatribes are summed up succinctly, “Paternoster was one of those unfortunates: a failed writer who still loved words; Paternoster especially loving words arranged to affect him psychosomatically; words that he still loved to read but would never again try to construct into sentences and paragraphs he or anyone else would read.”  This revelation cracked me up because I know a few Paternosters. The bar scene is filled with “a carnival of grotesques…the loner, the grifter, the drifter, the wiseass, and the dreamer; and one man, sitting alone, brooding over a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s…” Like many of Madera’s tales, there’s a sense of being surrounded by menace, and yet Paternoster remains committed to his pursuit of the quirky Katya, as if almost she has become an ironic Eurydice for his lost Orpheus.

We learn that Katya is married to a man named Seymour, and they live in Arverne by the Sea. Paternoster and Katya meet in different NYC locations, but we learn that Paternoster is really just “spinning his wheels” and that the flirtation would lead to an awkward residency with the three characters in Far Rockaway.

“Paternoster had long given up any reasonable expectation for life to move,processionally, from a beginning to a middle to an end not only because he hadrejected any idea of linearity, not only because of life’s constant interruptions-butalso because of the ever-proliferating appearance of machines, their blips andbleeps, with their almost-Pavlonian effect on everyone, resulting not only in anoverwhelming unpredictability; not only in fidgety restlessness and easy excitability,not to mention constant inattention; not only in having notions about the past,present, and future congeal into an ever-present now and wow, where a sugar-rushcompulsion to broadcast everything about yourself in a crushing cascade of imagesand status updates, to know everything about everyone, contributed to fauxomniscience and -presence, and an all-consuming chaos; but also, and notunsurprisingly, to a despairing sense of futility; a void with teeth (186).”

Without revealing too much, Paternoster seems lost in the fun house, and there seems to be a fascination with extremities throughout this tale, as if the physical location of Far Rockaway and Coney Island used in the story, sheds light on the strange isolation and ennui each character feels. Paternoster and Katya seem stranded, watching the sea, waiting for Seymour to perpetually return and thwart any advances they may make.

Numerous times during Nervosities we see darkly comical and yet philosophically driven insights into the modern world. These narrative voices pass into and through a world of distorted mirrors and dark passages, as they move to other states of being and disassociation from an unpredictable present.  Violence and menace often lurk around the corners of the stories. Madera’s prose plays beautifully with acoustics and seems often inspired by poetry. I was moved often by his use of the catalogue during the collection, something I associate with Whitman, and his narrators’ sense of irony, humor, and wit, even as they peer into the dark voids of modern life.

I’ll close my review with an insight from “Anatomy of a Broken Wingspan,” as the narrator considers interrupting the ramblings of his friend, Koko:

I wanted to say something, something important, but maybe silence was enough,maybe this silence was simply a packing together of pauses between the words Iwanted to say but could neither find nor assemble into any kind of order even if Icould find them. Sometimes it feels like you have been entrusted with beauty, ruins,truth, lies, mysteries, horrors, then required to hide them away, absorb them intoyour body until they are ready to be vomited up, your blood and guts smeared allover the necessary mess. But this is not what I wanted to say.

There are gems like this throughout Madera’s collection. The echo of Eliot’s Prufrock, the postmodern condition of our speakers carrying so much baggage and weight in the storytelling that they often simply choose to keep the incongruities to themselves, wrestle with them internally, and carry on.

Madera’s Nervosities juxtaposes so many layers of narrative and philosophical insight and meaning—it’s certainly not for a novice or casual reader of fiction. But it is a call for intrepid literary travelers who can hear the echoes of Stein, Beckett, Eliot, Whitman, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and others across these pages, to rise to its beautiful innovations, its playful use of fragmentation, to better see the chaotic yet meaningful narrative world multiplying under the surface of this rhizomatic text.

About the reviewer: Ian S. Maloney is Director of the Jack Hazard Fellowships for New Literary Project, a Contributor at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and on the Literary Council for the Brooklyn Book Festival.  Ian is the author of South Brooklyn Exterminating (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing 2024)