The Dark Art of Nebraska Realism

Reina de los Comodines, A History of Bad Men

Cat Taylor loves to spin stories about his romantic Bayou Country heritage, but in reality, he’s lived his life in deep Midwestern disappointment. A stereotypical pretentious drunk, Cat doesn’t speak with his nearly-grown kids, but he still aspires to build a relationship with Martha, the downstate girl he met on a dating app. He doesn’t realize that he’s walked into a netherworld that he may never escape.

Once upon a time, novelists published their works serially, dropping them chapter by chapter into high-gloss magazines and penny chapbooks. Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and even Hunter S. Thompson published their best-known works this way, which allowed them to adapt their storytelling to readers’ demands. But since television displaced magazines as truly mass media, this tradition has largely disappeared from print. Reina de los Comedines wants to resurrect the form.

Big River, Nebraska, is only a two-hour drive for Cat, who lives in the college town of Fetterman, but for Nebraskans, that’s a pretty wide gulf. Martha and Cat meet in The Bar, which, in this narrative, represents Nebraska’s id. Inside The Bar, Cat meets an ensemble cast of working-class Nebraskans who’ve seemingly trauma bonded over living in a city that modernity forgot. Reina de los Comedines writes herself into this cast.

According to Reina’s pre-release, this novel is a roman á clef, and most of her intended audience will recognize themselves. This probably undersells the actual story. The real Reina was a semi-public figure in the IRL equivalent of Big River, but chose to return to anonymity, as much as media-saturated modernity allows. This lets her depict her bar, and her Nebraska, as a highly symbolic mélange of aspiration and disappointment.

(As an aside, the real Reina lives in Big River, and I live in Fetterman. We met on a dating app. I’m trying not to take it personally.)

In the first two chapters, Cat and Martha try to have their first date, but it starts off rocky. Throughout almost the entire two chapters, The Bar’s denizens have a donnybrook about whether Jason Isbell is real country music. Chapter Three takes a sudden turn, leaping several months forward, finding Cat and “Martie” suddenly on the outs. The story also takes an abrupt tonal shift into magic realism.

Reina de los Comodines

Reading the chapters together, one suspects this later tone more accurately reflects the story Reina prefers to tell. The symbolism which her first chapters conceal in subtext, becomes more evident in Chapter Three. Her authorial self-insert character offers Cat the guidance he needs, but one gets the feeling, reading the nuanced complexity with which Cat responds, that this give-and-take is more internal than Reina admits.

When I say the author writes a self-insert, I don’t mean this as either an aspersion or a denigration. She gives the character her own pseudonym, and describes the character exactly as she depicts herself on social media. By writing herself into her story, Reina takes the initiative to tell the characters around her the truth they clearly need to hear—and to receive the criticism she needs to receive back from them.

Historically, Magic Realism has its greatest popularity in abandoned colonial empires. Jorge Luis Borges and Edwidge Danticat write from worldview predicated on the distrust that follows conquest. They present a world in which the Freudian subconscious, which citizens of industrialized empires seek to silence, is both present and real, in a physical sense. In the Magic Realist narrative, language creates reality, and symbols have mass.

That’s what happens in Reina’s third chapter. Her argument about whether Jason Isbell is real country music, is actually about who gets to control people’s identity in the hinterlands. Do the residents of forgotten agrarian communities like Big River decide for themselves, or do they purchase their identity from the corporate music publishers? In the first two chapters, this is subtext. In Chapter Three, it becomes the focus.

It may seem like I’m harping on about just three chapters. Because of this novel’s serial nature, I suspect Reina is still developing themes as she writes. However, I’m eager to see where this story goes, and to keep writing, she needs an audience. Therefore I’m willing to review a novel that’s still finding its feet in real time, because I feel it’s off to a promising start.

I postponed writing this review because I hoped to read Chapter Four, which was due to drop. However, Reina has a job and a kid, and deadlines are elastic. I only hope to steer her the audience her work deserves.