Disparates: The Freewheelin’ Patrick Madden
In Disparates, his latest and third collection of essays, Madden introduces “disparate” both as a noun referring to diverse and incongruous things and as (a definition he embraces) having connotations from Spanish of “absurdity, inanity, frivolity; nonsense, claptrap, rubbish; balderdash, malarkey, drivel.” In other words, as he engages the reader, Madden is enjoying himself.
free·wheel·ing /ˈfrēˌ(h)wēliNG/ adjective
characterized by a disregard for rules or conventions; unconstrained or uninhibited. (Google Dictionary)
Patrick Madden, the essayist, is freewheeling. To borrow the term from Bob Dylan and a technique from Madden’s book, I’ve defined what I mean. He’s unconventional, but his work is luminous:
lu·mi·nous /ˈlo͞omənəs/ adjective
full of or shedding light; bright or shining, especially in the dark. (also Google Dictionary)
In Disparates, his latest and third collection of essays, Madden introduces “disparate” both as a noun referring to diverse and incongruous things and as (a definition he embraces) having connotations from Spanish of “absurdity, inanity, frivolity; nonsense, claptrap, rubbish; balderdash, malarkey, drivel.” In other words, as he engages the reader, Madden is enjoying himself.
One of the joys for writers and readers of personal essays is to go where no one has gone before—or to go where everyone has gone before but to get there by surprise. A current finalist for the Foreword Reviews INDIES Awards, Disparates takes the reader on a voyage to new places and to old places by new means. As, in his words, “a longtime committed nonfictionist, one who teaches his students not to lie, [but] to select and shape their real experiences into literature,” Madden has a gift for uncovering timeless and timely truths in a wide assortment of ways that one can newly savor and appreciate. This book is diverse (very), whimsical and wise.
Before I offer up concrete examples, note that this assessment presupposes that book reviews should be useful. It should help you decide: “Yes, I really am going to read that book” or “Don’t give me Patrick Madden’s Disparates because I really will never have the time for it, not ever!”
So I want to help. More likely my words will incline you, not convince you, but I hope to incline most readers in the direction towards. Granted some people may hate the cognitive dissonance posed by variety in tone, subject, style, and authorship in a single volume; these possibly should not read Disparates (though it might be good for them if they did). If a sudden mood shift from a chortle to sober reflection or to itchy perplexity elicits anxiety in you, maybe don’t read it. If a single author’s voice near imperceptibly morphing into a completely different, first person, original voice of a totally different author raises worry rather than delight, then take a deep breath before proceeding, because Madden’s essays are all these things. But if you relish changing it up now and then and you take satisfaction in thinking about life’s little mysteries, enjoying the stimulation of different, sometimes juxtaposed moods and thoughts, then you will take satisfaction, maybe even some joy, from Madden’s book.
So how do I incline you? Let me count the adjectives, at least as a beginning. Disparates is, yes, diverse, also creative, funny, poignant, thoughtful, absurd, polyphonic, erudite, and surprising. The verbs: it evokes, entertains, bemuses, engages, moves, and mindfully meanders.
But all of this is too abstract! The nouns: it is, well, hmm, this could be useful. Let’s say that Madden’s book comprises:
Two tables of contents.
A romp, complete with photos, through the possible adventures of writer Michael Martone’s water bottle and its remaining contents following a Martone university lecture. (Auction, anyone?)
A chapter called “Nostalgia,” with gnomes as its nominal subject, that may make you long for the good old days when more such essays were written.
An essay by guest writer Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas brilliantly extracted (and presented), a word here or a letter there, from a Madden mind excursion into late 70’s pop rock music.
Computer-generated “predictive text” mimicry of Madden’s own writing, sometimes sensible and sound, sometimes silly. (Which is this, for example? “We have always felt that existence is a strange amorphous miracle that means everything.”)
A truly lovely account of poetic vengeance taken on an unruly airline passenger via a baby’s dirty diaper.
A paean to popular lyrics that got me to listen to music by Toad the Wet Sprocket. (Now why didn’t I think of that name for my band?)
Essays buried in word search puzzles, very clever though mercifully decoded for those lacking the persistence to work through them.
A hyperbolic apology for minor errors appearing in Madden’s previous books that evokes the suspicion that all books contain many mistakes of little consequence.
An illustrated comical and communal effort to rewrite cultural proverbs: “Take time to smell the grindstone” or “You made your bed, now let sleeping dogs lie in it.”
An essayistic nod to Montaigne. And a photograph of Madden looking like Montaigne.
Some elements of style on “comma-then” constructions, reductio ad absurdumed.
A thoughtful rejection of widely accepted punk rock glorifications of mayhem and violence.
Pangram Haiku, kind thoughts, with photos.
“Freewill,” my favorite, and to which I’ll return.
And much more.
Many of Madden’s cerebral sprees are enhanced by the cameo appearances of other essayists. Martone, Cabeza-Vanegas, Joni Tevis, Mary Cappello, Lawrence Sutin, Jericho Parms, Amy Leach, Desirae Matherly, Joe Oestreich, David Lazar, Elena Passarello, Wendy S. Walters, Stephen Haynie, and Matthew Gavin Frank all offer words, sentences, paragraphs, or entire sections to Madden’s chapters. One admires Madden’s ability and humble willingness to recruit other voices at the risk of eclipsing his own, but can’t help but appreciate the generosity of the guest contributors in making Madden’s good book better, knowing that Madden will win most of the accolades. Having said that, occasionally it is impossible to tell where Madden’s voice ends and his co-author’s begins. Italicized text may give it away but not always. We know only that credit is given at the beginning of the chapter and in the acknowledgements, and from there we get to play a little literary detective.
Sometimes these other voices support a direction Madden is going (e.g., Leach); sometimes they stand in contrast (Oestreich); sometimes they are just there, existing on their own merits. For instance Michael Martone, whose water bottle dregs feature in the book’s opening essay, lends his voice in a later chapter to a Madden reverie on musical coincidences (those moments when the “music angels” seem to conspire to play on the radio the old song you were just thinking of, for example). Martone’s appraisal isn’t about music, however, but about accident and irony and coincidence viewed through the vehicle of vehicular accidents. Martone’s part, linked to Madden’s neither by coincidence nor accident but by design, highlights the “delicious irony” pointed out by his son when Martone destroys their car in an accident the day after the son receives his driver’s permit. In telling the story Martone serves up the added irony of him writing about car accidents while admitting that he forbids his freshmen students to write about their car accidents because these accidents have “not altered the world of its narrator in any meaningful way.” Martone accentuates the irony through his meaningful pronouncement: “Perhaps things were set in motion in my life all those years ago by the coincidence of two cars inhabiting the same space and time. It would be a good story but I would need to imagine the true vectors of the collision, the physics of consequence not coincidence.”
On the subject of auto accidents, I now, as promised, freely return to “Freewill,” the essay through which Madden freewheels with abandon, engaging, entertaining, and all the while making sense. Although I very much enjoyed almost all of the essays in this book, I found in “Freewill” most everything that I admire in Madden’s writing.
“Freewill” starts with a cassette tape and an anecdote about a different minor accident to an automobile in which Madden was a teenage passenger. This first paragraph is partly about the accident, partly about his friend who caused the accident and partly about the Rush song “Freewill.” But then, as with the wrongly chosen gear that caused the collision, it shifts in tone and topic, with Madden’s direct invitation to the reader, breaking some kind of fourth genre fourth wall, to “take an associative jaunt together…understanding that there is no whole to be comprehended, no essential destination, and that what you read is only a shadow and approximation, a selection and translation of the memories I have here revived or the thoughts currently and recently swirling around my head, so that it is no detour to think linguistically instead of narratively. It is the inevitable path of the essay.”
At this point Madden takes up the meaning of “erstwhile,” questions whether he used it appropriately to describe his friend in his story of the car collision, explains his former confusion between “erstwhile” and “ersatz” which streams him to memories of his college English professor Erskine Peters and then to a jazz drummer named Peter Erskine whom he tangentially links to a feature in an old music magazine about Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer, which provides another touchstone and completed cycle to “Freewill,” lyrics by Peart, the song on the cassette tape that was playing during the opening fender bender and now lies moldering in a hypothetical landfill.
Somewhere in all that Madden also manages to debate guest essayist Joe Oestreich about the meaning of Peart’s “Freewill” lyric: “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.” I’ll leave the direction and resolution of that debate to the future reader of the essay (which by now, I’m hoping is you). Regardless, Madden’s “Freewill” has a little of everything: a good story, elegant and witty language, straight lines and deviation, humor, music, and thoughtfulness.
Disparates. Also Sprach Patrick Madden: I’ve tried to offer a disparate, helpful review of his work. Perhaps my allusions to Bob Dylan and Star Trek and Ricard Strauss merely suggest my age. But in the end, I hope a lot of people will read this excellent little book. If you love the personal essay, or are open to learning to love it, the freewheeling, luminous, disparate Patrick Madden is well worth the time.