In John Madera’s debut fiction collection, Nervosities, heavy concepts—diaspora, transversalism, the over-saturated and over-stimulated post-industrialized world Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man could only have dreamed about—are woven by Madera into human stories with such subtle, virtuoso touches, that Nervosities becomes much more than an objet conceptual.

Madera creates a mesmerizing sensorium, often building up complex images and textures through colour and smell, “gold papery onions, Christmasy red and green chilies, itsy-bitsy pebbly peas and beans,” “oozing tubes of organic, herbal, and antioxidant goop,” only to undo the hinges and take the back out to reveal the nuts and bolts of his illusions. Madera’s great gift, though, is that while dispelling the illusion he keeps us doubly mesmerized, such as here in this now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t passage from the story “Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata”:

Elizabeth or Elisabeth, with its innumerable variations, like Alžbeta, a Czechoslovakian variant; Erzsébet, the Hungarian version; or Eilís from Irish, or the Italian Elisabetta, or the Polish Elzbieta, or the Portuguese and Russian variant: Elizabeta, or the Romanian Elisabeta, or the Scandinavian Elisabet; or one of Elizabeth’s countless plain and grainy nicknames, like Bess, Bessie, Bessy, Beth, Betsy, Betty, Elsie, Liz, Lizzie, Libby, Lisa, and Liza.

Elizabeth or Elisabeth is undone in her passage to becoming Liza. But however far Madera unmoors his subject from safe narrative footholds, each story holds together through pure lyrical voodoo.

One of the great thrills of Nervosities is the sheer variety of textures. In a story called “Reflection of a Walking Ruin,” Madera flies at both high and low altitudes within the space of a page—introducing us to Virgil, Gertrude Stein, Lynch’s Mullholland Drive, Roy Orbison, Jacques Rancière, Lyotard, Flaubert, Perec, Derrida and Rothko, then bringing us down to earth (with a welcome bang) through a character called Billy who jumps “into the bus, and then threw our shoe at the bus, and saw Billy’s unmarked but beer-wet face curled into that same sitcom smile, and Billy flipped the bird at us.” 

Published by Anti-Oedipus Press (named after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book), Nervosities is haunted by Deleuze. Madera’s lyricism intersects with the philosophical open space created by Deleuzian concepts, such as multiplicities, assemblages, paradoxes, immanence, bodies without organs, and this interplay gives many of the stories in this collection their edge—asking how we recognise reality in an age of virtual turbo-Capitalism or discern between the real and the hyper-real or the unreal in a schizophrenic society. Clara, a character in “Pearls Can Be Dissolved in Vinegar,” comments: “‘I love CGI,’ she says. ‘It’s more real than real.’”

Pull at one thread in any of Madera’s best pages, and it becomes clear how integral each small part is in Madera’s design to serving the whole intricate fabric, like any phrase in the following passage from “Bees Build Perfect Hexagons with Their Spit”:

Here is my brain: a swollen sewage grate after rainfall—inkbled newsprint, 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; like nuts, samaras, and seed pods; like shushing rain and silent snow; like sleet and hail, pellets, a perpetually whisked beaded curtain, clattering to 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, did succeed in filling my mind with things to think about, kept me from thinking about other things I should have been thinking about but did not want to think about.

Getting lost in sentences like these is like rambling through a spectacular foreign city; and the great joy of reading John Madera’s Nervosities is getting lost, loath to find yourself again on dull familiar ground.

***

Nervosities
by John Madera
Anti-Oedipus Press; 208 p.

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