John Madera's collection of stories, Nervosities, is not "experimental" in that it rejects most readers' expectations of form in fiction: Most of the stories feature well-developed characters from whose relatively accessible points of view (both first-person and 3rd-person "free indirect") the events in the stories are related. Although these are not "plot-driven" stories with carefully laid-out scenes contributing to a narrative "arc," they are indeed stories; things happen to and through the characters, and these things have dramatic significance, especially in the conclusions to many of the stories. What is dramatized serves the stories' thematic purposes, which in most cases are relatively apparent, although they are not insistently accented, instead realized through setting and character interaction.
But all of these elements are mediated through Madera's dynamic style, which does take the stories out of the ordinary, marking them as separate from conventional "literary fiction." At its most adventurous, this style seems a kind of untamed amalgam of Gary Lutz and Thomas Bernhard:
Here is my brain: a swollen sewage grate after rainfall--inkbled newprint, leafy bits, had-it twigs, mucosal drift bunging up the holes. Listing in my mind different things that fall (like petals, leaves, and pinecones; like acorns, berries, and other fruit; samaras, and seed pods; like shushing rain and silent snow; like sleet and hail, pellets, a perpetually whisked beaded curtain, clattering up the ground; like massy meteorites mussing up the mud) was, perhaps, superfluous; and thinking about how human beings (who are, in one sense, natural objects themselves, subject to all the causal laws of the physical world), if dropped from a height, will fall at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, until the rate of their fall reaches terminal velocity, was not an adequate replacement for the pernicious idea of the so-called great fall of man; but these thoughts, of falling things, while perhaps so much belly lint-picking, kept me from thinking about other things I should have been thinking about but did not want to think about. . . . ("Bees Build Perfect Hexagons with Their Spit")
More controlled than Bernhard's headlong expository monologues, less obsessively focused on surprising verbal devices than Lutz (although evoking each of these strategies), Madera's style isn't simply the vehicle for relating character and event, and doesn't serve as the kind of verbal decoration that often passes for "good writing." Language in most of these stories doesn't serve their conventional elements at all but instead makes manifest something like the reverse: plot, character, setting are a function of the use of language, its particular qualities invoking the illusions of plot or character in a particular way. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but Madera's stories are most unconventional in their rejection of the usual attempts to conceal the artifice of language, to make language transparent to the needs of narrative.
The book's first few stories are rather more verbally constrained than some of the later stories, which suggests a process of discovering a more audacious prose style, although these stories still do not rely on familiar sorts of characters or ordinary situations. Indeed, "Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs" and "Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata." the first two stories, incorporate uncommon settings (not to mention story titles), the first featuring a man who has moved to an Indian city on the Ganges, where apparently he hopes to die, the second recounting the story of a Cuban girl who becomes a participant in the Mariel boatlift, a notorious mass emigration to the U.S. Both stories introduce a background of political turmoil, hints of which also recur in later stories but never really become a primary focus of the book's concerns. "Some Varieties of Being" does present us with a character whose general type--alienated both from his circumstances and from himself--recurs in later stories and whose predicament more nearly illustrates a dominant theme in the book ("Nervosities" seems a coinage particularly applicable to these characters.)
Although many of the characters in Nervosities are dissatisfied with their lives (some more consciously than others), two stories ("Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan" and "An Incommodious Vehicle") feature a protagonist who has essentially given up on conventional social existence, drifting without a fixed abode or much desire for remunerative work. In each case the character accepts temporary lodging with friends, but the events in the stories really only reinforce the protagonists' social estrangement, although in the first the character does strike up a friendship of sorts with a local homeless man, with whom at the story's conclusion he shares a convivial home-cooked meal. In some stories there are indications by story's end that the protagonist has come to a decision that might alter his/her circumstances (a man abandons his "dingy apartment," clearly an emblem for the dinginess of his life, a woman finally ends things with the boyfriend she clearly doesn't love), but in others no such decision seems possible. (In "Nature Under Constraint and Vexed," a man suffers a ruptured appendix that is going to kill him.) The characters in Nervosities inhabit an American culture that is hostile to their well-being and for which they have little affinity.
Perhaps the grimmest story in the book is "To Have Done with the Division of Moving Bodies," featuring a man, an Iraq War veteran, who has just killed his girlfriend's dog after the girlfriend has broken up with him. Although the story circles back to depict how the man (called simply "the killer") was affected by his experiences in Iraq (three deployments) and his difficulties in adjusting to life back home with the girlfriend, it nevertheless doesn't hesitate in showing the merciless brutality of the man's action. The story both maintains a clinical distance from the compromised protagonist (partly by never giving him a name) and takes us far enough into the man's mind that he doesn't become merely a brute, his behavior entirely unaccountable. There is no sentimentality in Nervosities: the stories concern characters who are damaged by reality, but they don't make excuses for the characters. They just register the damage in Madera's kinetically alert language.
Although these stories are by no means formally conservative (several feature unconventional formal devices), for the most part all of them could really be called works of a particularly disabused kind of realism, depicting a mostly broken culture. However, this realism is itself a route on the way to style, not vice-versa. Through reminding us that the reimagining of reality through the devices of language is the essence of literary art, Madera's stories both heighten our impression of the disenchanted lives they portray and challenge our passive reading habits.
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