Title: Disparates
Author: Patrick Madden
Genre: essay collection
University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 156 pages.
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
Creative nonfiction—memoir, personal essay, lyric; nature, travel, immersive research; art, argument, entertainment—baffles those who haven’t heard it called by that name, beckons those who have stories to tell and language to tell it in, bursts out in word- and thought-fireworks at audiences fortunate enough to encounter it. The genre’s been around for centuries, evolving as human consciousness has evolved, many forms for many ways of thinking and many words with which to respond to human life. Those who study the essay form know there’s a deep vein of rich ore to mine when we go there, from Seneca and Plutarch to Montaigne and Lamb to Woolf and Wolfe and David Foster Wallace. It’s a long historical intertextual feast, a genre-fest of inquiry and humor and self-deprecation and -discovery.
Gene England was the church’s personal essay guru in the last decades of the twentieth century. He brought thought and faith together in rhetorically inventive essays like “Easter Weekend: A Personal Fiction” and “Blessing the Chevrolet,” where commentary complemented story and anecdote augmented philosophy and LDS readers could finally find one of their own asking hard contemporary questions, essaying through to multiple kinds of replies.
At Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, we’ve had a Personal Voices section for a long time. Mormons like to tell personal stories; readers and writers of personal essays alike find pleasure and solace in winding their ways around what our stories mean.
But it’s not often we get the delight of both scholarly inflection on the genre and one of our own reaching out into the essayable world and bringing the best of it back. Patrick Madden, BYU professor, originator of the student-curated collection of classic essays quotidiana.com, author of the essay collections Quotidiana and Sublime Physick, and co-editor of After Montaigne with David Lazar, is fully committed as scholar and writer to the genre, and we—lucky us!–are the benefactors.
His new collection, Disparates, deserves your every attention. Madden has an interesting family, a love for rock music, a whimsical sense of humor, and a terrific ability to play with an ancient and venerable form. Flip through the pages of this slim volume and you can see the fun he’s having, beginning with the prological definition of his title. It’s a two-and-a-half-page dictionary definition complete with pronunciations, etymologies, examples, and a black-and-white rendering of Francisco de Goya’s Disparate ridiculo to illustrate the essence of “folly.” “Disparate” means, in English, “miscellaneous,” “that which does not fit,” “absurdity,” “monstrosity.” In Spanish (a language Madden and his Uruguayan wife speak fluently) it means “nonsense,” “foolishness,” “that which is thrown out violently, precipitously.” All these definitions pertain to the things he covers in these thirty pieces. (Yes, do the math: most of them are only a few pages long. The book’s a lot of fun to read on the fly.)
So anyway, there are drawings and photographs, all attributed properly and in smile-inducing ways like the ones his children drew for the “The Proverbial __________” (94), a collection of mixed metaphors the representations of which are hilarious. “If you can’t beat a dead horse, join him”: a dead-bug corpse of a beast, his ribs heaving. “Take time to smell the grindstone”: an almost Edward Gorey-like machine just waiting to mill your nose to its glutinous end. And so on.
“Unpredictable Essays” is one of my favorites. Madden is playing with Botnik’s Predictive Writer app, generating blocks of words from his own previous writing which are, in this essay, printed white (or maybe pale pink?) on a black background, interspersed with asterisked paragraphs in regular black-on-white in his own current style. The computer-generated sections made me snort out loud: “There’s more to live without than there is to get inside. I have come to understand others unclearly, sometimes halfheartedly, rarely boldly…” (23) These black blocks sort of make an amazing kind of poetical sense, but not really. They’re the “nonsense” kind of disparate, and Madden’s commentary on them in the black-on-white sections mocks and kids and pokes at what a computer will do to his words, ruminating on how humans and nonhumans alike try to make meaning out of what we’re given. That’s been the joy of essays from their inception: they’re self-referencing, meta-writings whose point is that we think and talk about how we think and talk, and thus we move ourselves forward. It’s nonsense, it’s foolishness—it’s the most fun thing Madden can think of to do.
There’s an interview with the modern grandfather of essays Montaigne himself, in which Madden steps in and out of Montaigne’s shoes to answer his own interview questions (78). (This one features Lazar, as several of the essays “feature” one essayist or another from the world of the contemporary genre.) There’s a colloquy on the word “thumb,” as if Madden had co-opted a prompt given to fifth-graders to see what he could do with it (“Thumbthing tells me I’m into thumbthing good”) (89). There are moments in airports, puzzlements about door malfunctions, ponderations upon daddyhood.
And perhaps my very favorite is the series of five word-search puzzles, beneath each of which is a few sentences of a poignant essay about Madden’s mother’s funeral (“Repast,” 46). The sentences comprise the words in the word search. His mother loved the puzzles. The solutions to the puzzles are at the back of the book, but just knowing that the words are all there in the puzzles and his mother is all there in the essay makes the disparity between a “normal” essay and Madden’s play all the more delightful.
Whether or not you’re familiar with creative nonfiction, this book will make you smile and will heal your virally quarantined heart. Buy a copy, go to the website, find a new favorite. The world is more disparate than is dreamed of in your philosophy, reader. Madden will show you how.