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.

The Modern Anglo-Japanese Troubadour

Jan Miklaszewicz, The Promise: A Narrative Poem

In a distant valley of a distant nation, the word comes down: our prince is going to war, and the knight of the village must report. The knight’s wife has a grim premonition, but it isn’t within the knight’s star to say no, so he girds on his sword and marches into battle. Every night she walks the village parapets, watching to see whether and when her beloved soldier returns.

English poet Jan Miklaszewicz dresses his narrative in Japanese vestments; his knight is a samurai, and his lord a daimyo. But the themes of Miklaszewicz’s verse novella are familiar from countless Childe ballads and French troubadour rhymes. The image of a knight with conflicting duties occurs in numerous folksongs and official poetry. We only wait to see whether the beloved’s fatal visions are doomed to come true.

Miklaszewicz writes his novella in tanka, a major Japanese verse structure. Usually written in a single line of kanji, the English-language tanka usually breaks into five lines, with strict syllable counts. Japanese tanka usually aren’t narrative themselves, but most often embedded in a larger prose narrative, like their more famous offshoot, the haiku. Miklaszewicz instead expands the form, using the syllable count to define the stanza counts of his chapters.

The feudal Japan Miklaszewicz describes is a dreamland, a no-place devoid of proper nouns. It’s dotted with waving grasses and ancient shrines, and village life is languid until the daimyo’s call arrives. Attentive readers will recognize the landscape from Chretien de Troyes’ mythical Arthurian Britain. This isn’t a knock against Miklaszewicz’s storytelling: as C.S. Lewis pointed out, true virtue is always in another time, in a distant land.

Thus freed from strict realism, Miklaszewicz lets his familiar troubadour themes play out. Nothing really new happens, if you’re familiar with the English folk ballad tradition, but that doesn’t mean there’s no suspense. The Childe ballads contain enough variations that their stories could go multiple directions, and we never know what comes next until it happens, then it seems downright inevitable. The same thing happens here.

And Miklaszewicz uses his medieval verse form artfully. His language is so rhythmical that readers can practically hear the plucked shamisen behind the stanzas. Miklaszewicz’s Japan evokes images from sumi-e paintings and Hokusai’s block prints: fragrant, melodious, and mythical.

In their village home
she senses a subtle shift,
a kindling of hope,
and in the eye of her mind
she glimpses his sweet return,

Jan Miklaszewicz

(Every stanza and chapter ends with a comma, emphasizing that we haven’t reached the end. Miklaszewicz doesn’t include a period until the final line.)

Let me interrupt myself to address an important concern that more attentive readers might’ve already anticipated. I recognize the risks inherent in a Western poet using Japanese verse forms and a Japanese mythical setting. Colonial-era European writers like Lord Byron or Rudyard Kipling exploited “inscrutable Orient” twaddle to romanticize imperial conquest. I’ve read enough Edward Said to know that Orientalist mythmaking has had adverse consequences.

Yet Japanese poets themselves wrote considerable volumes of similar dreamland exploration. Bashō, who popularized the haiku form, wrote travelogues so expansive and mythical that recent critics question whether he visited the described places. Travel, to medieval Japanese writers, wasn’t about accurately depicting the visited lands; it was about the subjective experience of abandoning one’s comfort zone and wandering off the map.

In that regard, Miklaszewicz does what most modern Anglophone poets aspire to accomplish: making the familiar unfamiliar, the distant near, and the real world subjective. He uses comfortable themes his likely readers will recognize from folk ballads and traditional poetry, but filters them through his imagination. The product is cozy, without being sleepy. And it rewards multiple levels of reading, from the casual to the scholarly.

I mentioned French troubadours previously. These traveling poets, and their Irish colleagues the bards, made their names by composing and singing verses about distant lands, mythical battles, and noble warriors. Miklaszewicz joins that tradition, updating it for a more cosmopolitan and literate age. His versifying is both familiar and new, using pre-Renaissance storytelling conventions for an audience more familiar with a diverse world. His product is surprising and comfy.

This poem is melodious, sweeping, and short: committed readers could savvy it in one sitting. Miklaszewicz’s storytelling carries readers along without resistance. Yet like the best poetry—including the Childe ballads I keep mentioning—the verse rewards a slow savoring and lingering contemplation. Reading it, we feel transported outside ourselves, and upon returning, we feel we’ve truly traveled somewhere magical.

The Poet of Hollywood Boulevard

Martin Ott, Interrogations: Stories

A young man, who cannot reconcile himself to married life, must return to Mosquito Island to repair his relationship with the first woman he loved: his mother. An aging mother, whose daughter has been praying to a mysterious Virgin Mary sculpture, realizes she must make her own miracles. A husband and wife, drifting apart, discover their very literal bond when their daughter physically glues them together.Twenty short, powerful snippets, given brief but luminous life.

As a poet, Martin Ott has a distinctive voice. Blending his military experience, society’s suffusion with media, and the intricacies of making a life in entertainment, his verse has a concise punch often missing in poetry written by tenure-track professors. Ott’s fiction somewhat lacks that confidence, appropriating elements from other authors he respects and emulates. Not that his fiction isn’t good; he’s a skilled mimic. Rather, as a fictioneer, he’s clearly early in his career.

And what influences he mimics. Reading his stories, veteran audiences will recognize Ott emulating Annie Proulx, TC Boyle, and Deborah Eisenberg, among others. His eclectic borrowing gives this book an encyclopedic feeling, like a Best Contemporary American Short Fiction anthology filtered through an ambitious student’s viewpoint. Sometimes one suspects he’s imitating established authors because he lacks confidence in his own tale to tell. Other times, it’s like uncovering a lost work by some favorite writer.

Ranging from under two to nearly thirty pages, Ott’s stories span a gamut of styles, voices, and influences. Some stories have overtones of magic realism, especially as characters create their own realities, then drag others with them, willfully or otherwise. Sometimes Ott limits himself to strict realism, hitting readers directly with a jarring overload of detail. Stories occasionally hint at mysteries and thrillers, though he avoids recourse to detectives and other professionals. Ott’s voices swell.

At his best, Ott’s language resembles the poet he usually is. Momentary glimpses of powerful, incisive language strip away characters’ pretensions, especially in his shortest stories, where a single moment becomes an entire life. A little girl promises her faux boyfriend: “We’ll do dangerous things, then we’ll fight about it.” A former military interrogator (not the author himself, surely) “yearned to break men like bread sticks.” This doesn’t just best breaking twigs; it invests family, hearth, and religion into violence.

Martin Ott

Ott’s geography is somewhat uneven. His best stories emphasize two regions: his adopted home of coastal California (some highlight San Francisco, but experienced coast-dwellers will recognize it’s transparently a cipher for Los Angeles), and small-town Michigan, a region he revisits often enough, one suspects it’s his home domain. California, for Ott, represents dreams made manifest, the admixture of sun-kissed opportunity and bitter disappointment, the two experiences most Californians recognize from working overtime in the sun.

Michigan, however, is something Ott’s characters mainly reconcile themselves with. His Michigan stories mostly involve somebody, not always the viewpoint character, returning after fleeing, confronting some long-buried truth. “Home,” to these characters, represents something they escape, even while living there (underage drinking and drug abuse, which numb users to the present, are ubiquitous). But a bad home is still home, and Ott’s characters return because they need stability. Even if they must build it themselves.

Besides these two locations, Ott liberally uses images from Wyoming, Alaska, Seattle, and elsewhere. These sites, unfortunately, are more general and vague than California or Michigan, giving the suspicion Ott has simply elected to imitate other authors (Proulx in Wyoming, or Boyle in Alaska) he finds influential. The locations become more like generalized non-places than actual locations. If we can accept the dreamlike conditions, the places are okay. But they lack Michigan’s detailed, meaty realism.

Thus accepting Ott’s stories requires accepting Ott. Though a master poet, he remains a journeyman fiction writer, and demands an audience that can accept his learning curve. I mostly can; only very late in this volume do Ott’s inconsistencies become prominent enough to bother me. Even when he presents Wyoming, a state I know pretty well, as more archetype than location, I feel only minor twinges. Ott’s still learning fiction, and that’s okay.

At his best, Martin Ott’s fiction peels away the layers of pretense to uncover the underlying facts, like the interrogator he once was. Narrative, for Ott, exposes characters’ inner journey, as most literary fiction does, but it also exposes the factual core beneath subjective experience. And often, Ott exposes the jarring friction between reality and experience. Like an interrogator, Ott pierces pretense, laying reality bare to criticism and to brisk, informed response.