Oh, my beloved Hawthorne imprint, whose every book I like.
The Next Scott Nadelson is a memoir about a guy living in Portland who gets dumped by his fiancee and is depressed for a while, but eventually gets over it—that is to say, it’s a memoir about an ordinary person reeling around in the dramas of ordinary life. With something like this it’s all about the rendering of detail and the level of insight the person is able to achieve into their dramas. Scott Nadelson writes wonderful detail and treats himself gently but unsparingly.
It’s really, really good.
I enjoyed the parts about Nadelson’s depression and suffering—who doesn’t like to read about someone else moping, especially when they’re up-front about it? Here’s how the book begins:
“A few years ago, when I was still living in Portland, single and shadowed by a persistent and unaccountable sense of failure, I gave a reading in a downtown bookstore. It was late winter, and I didn’t expect anyone to show up.”
There’s something very comforting about a person sharing his “persistent and unaccountable sense of failure.”
Nadelson then travels back in time, explaining how ended up a mere month away from marriage with a woman of whom he says, “she struggled with depression, she had a temper, she didn’t like my friends,” and who dumped him for a drag king named Donny Manicotti, leaving him “bewildered and devastated.”
Then he goes further back, to high school, when he felt a vague, incoherent waiting for some adventure to occur (the teen scavenger hunt set-piece from this chapter is hilarious), and then junior high, when he longed to be invisible.
It’s this invisibility and minor cowardice that he ends up linking to his adult failures, that he finds when he sets out to “look at what you don’t want to see.” At the end of a particularly wonderful chapter about being hazed at camp, he writes:
“Now, once again, as I picture my younger self standing in that doorway, so small and unassuming, hair tangled with cowlicks, shirt marred with grass stains, I have a terrible urge to call out. Go on, I want to tell him. Get it over with. If you can stop hiding now, you’ll save us so much trouble later on.”
Just beautiful. Made me cry.
Hiding and denying his own desires is part of Nadelson’s depressive strategy and, nearing the end of the book when he’s soon to rejoin the world, there’s a house renovation he walks by:
“On a quiet side street, where the ground sloped up abruptly and the houses were built into the hillside, an old Victorian had been lifted off its foundation and propped a dozen feet above the ground to make room for another full story beneath…. My initial reaction was outrage, which surprised me as much as the sight itself. Why should people want so much? Why couldn’t they be satisfied with a beautiful house as it was?”
He becomes obsessed, visiting the house nearly every day, wishing the owners ill, spying on them, disturbed by the air and space beneath the house and by it’s inhabitants’ obliviousness to disaster. The image of a house floating up in the air is a wonderful one in a book about a man trying to establish a self and a life–a house, if you will, to live in. The lesson of his obsession with it is not if his response is reasonable or spiteful, right or wrong, but that he cares, deeply, and will have to get a house—though a less obnoxious one—of his own.
An Anthology of Clouds 