Ann Sterzinger feature self-immolating loser protagonist who spiral into mental illness in response to the world rejecting him. A comic yet poignant expression of an entire generation’s angst

Ann Sterzinger, NVSQVAM (Nowhere), Nine-Banded Books, 2011.


Somebody said that alienation was a disease of the middle class. Probably Marx, but Lester Reichartsen doesn't have time to look it up. A decade ago, Lester was kicked out of the most popular punk band in Chicago. Since then he's been party to an accidental pregnancy, talked into marrying the other party, and roped into an academic career in Classical Letters, so time won't allow him to be curious about anything outside his discipline. But if whoever said that was right, Lester is middle class for sure: The island of college-town academics he lives on now makes him feel almost as alien as the village of Bible-Belt idiots that surrounds it. So why is it that when some meth head breaks into his little family's cramped apartment, the only thing they find of value to steal is his seven-year-old computer? If this is the middle class, then Lester doesn t want to know what's below it.


If Celine and Hamsun weren't fascists, they'd be Ann Sterzinger. --Nick Mamatas



Ann Sterzinger's writing is electric. Her 100,000-watt power singes every page of NVSQVAM (nowhere). - Frank Marcopolos

We live in a time in which all positive ideologies of the past-- be they Right- or Left-wing; good, bad, or ugly-- are swiftly spiraling towards the chopping block of "the end of history." It seems impossible, in today's post-modern climate of perpetual intellectual suspicion, to sustain a rigorous attachment to any point of view without eventually betraying an impulse to succumb to irony and flippant mockery of concepts once considered sacred and profound.

Indeed, the momentum of iconoclasm, begun in earnest in the West in the 1960s and 70s (though perhaps in the process of unraveling for decades or even centuries prior), cannot easily be arrested. First it assaults the traditional sacred cows, and then it turns it fury on the tenets of the newfangled Zeitgeist.

Today, with "cultural Marxism" in ascendency, it is those liberal, namby-pamby, politically-correct shibboleths and bromides (mostly concerning enforced hypersensitivity towards the supposed sensibilities of non-Whites, women, and homosexuals) that are ripest for derision, detestation, and demolition. What used to be revolutionary has become commonplace, and in becoming commonplace, has lost all appeal. To put it plainly, and vulgarly, no one really believes any of that "diversity" shit anymore. No one believes much of anything anymore, in fact. We have entered an age of "anti-ideologies," a time in which the most anger, energy, and focus seems driven in an exclusively negative direction, dedicated and determined less to prove anything than to disprove everything.

Perhaps the most extreme form of negativism is a belief system called antinatalism. As expressed at Jim Crawford's webpage www.antinatalism.net, this mindset amounts to the argument that life isn't worth living, and that human beings ought not reproduce, since to cause another person to come into existence is to do this person the gravest of disservices. Crawfords Confessions of an Antinatalist and David Benatar's Better Never to Have Been both make an erudite case for this gloomy perspective, but the best way to propound a philosophy is to tell it in the form of a parable.

Thus we have Ann Sterzinger's striking and harrowing new novel NVSQVAM (Nowhere), which gives shape, form, purposefulness, and pathos to this rather brutally nihilistic, unabashedly morose, and pitlilessly unyielding case against life.

Given that Sterzinger is an outspoken antinatalist herself (check out her amusingly droll and profane blog www.fineillstartagoddamnblog.blogspot.com), one is unprepared for just how devastatingly hilarous her prose can be. Yet most of Nowhere reads, somewhat surprisingly, like a comedy, riffing on life's unremitting terribleness for the express purpose of provoking bitter, yet still hearty belly laughs in the unsuspecting reader. Her anti-hero Lester Reichartsen is a curmudgeonly would-be hipster, who finds himself listlessly pursuing a dead-end graduate degree in Classical Letters and raising an irritatingly precocious son he never wanted, all the while unhappily married to an attractive, intelligent woman with a bright career in Spanish professorship, whose success Lester bitterly covets. When he isn't getting drunk or engaging in cheerless banter with snotty undergraduates projecting insufferable attitudes of smug entitlement, Lester pines for his glory days when he was the bandleader of an up-and-coming post-punk alternative rock group, the Incognito Mosquitoes.

Lester isn't always easy to like, and over the course of the book he makes some truly terrible choices which bring only misery to himself and those around him. Just the same, Sterzinger seems to see her protagonist as less of a villain and more of a poor bastard who, like everyone else, is simply fucked, because such is life. His story, like all of our stories, can only end in tragedy, because that is what it means to be human. Attending the story is an equally clever "meta-text" in the form of a series of frequent and copiously-worded footnotes, which describe the bizarre intracacies of modern American pop culture as if the reader were a representative of a future civilization, completely unfamiliar with contemporary phenomena like Kurt Cobain, Kermit the Frog, or Walmart.

As might be expected, Nowhere ends on a resolutely dismal and savagely forlorn note. I won't give it away, except to say that it isn't what you will have expected, you won't be prepared for it, and it will haunt you for days afterwards.

I have more than once been accused of having rather "dark" artistic sensibilities, but I must confess, Sterzinger's thoroughgoing antinatalism is a bit much, even for me. Call me a secret bourgeois Pollyannic poseur, but I like to have at least some hint of hope in the things I read, whether they be fiction or non-fiction. Still, I admire aesthetic integrtiy and appreciate literary talent, and Ann Sterzinger has both of these in spades. Take a trip to Nowhere, if you dare. - Andy Nowicki

This is an absolutely must-read novel.

Does it seem like I use that phrase a lot? Well, too bad. I’m not sure why, but a lot of people in this part of the Internet are resistant to the very idea of reading fiction. “That shit’s for girls, brah!” Maybe I’m just not alpha enough to devote all my free time to banging supermodels and bench-pressing 300 down at the gym, but I like novels. Good ones, anyway. Man does not live by bread alone, and you need to read fiction and literary nonfiction in order to become a well-rounded individual.

I’d rather die than live in a world where I can’t read books like NVSQVAM (Nowhere).

NVSQVAM trods familiar ground for manospherians, as it’s a tale of middle-class male ennui in the suburbs. The novel concerns Lester Reichartsen, poster boy for middle-aged white male failure, and his exile in a shithole college town in southern Illinois (the town is not named, but I suspect Carbondale, based on geographical descriptions and the fact that Sterzinger herself is an alum of the school there). Kicked out of a punk band and guilted into marrying his girlfriend Evelyn after she gets pregnant, Lester resorts to grad school, last refuge of the middle-aged loser, while despising everything about his life:

As Lester tamped down the memories, a woman in a vomit-green sort of tank slowed down to get a better look at him. Propped against the massive window next to her was a purple gym bag with huge letters saying PROUD TO BE A CHRISTIAN MOM. But her hot-dog-roll bangs and sticking looking fake eyelashes gave her the air of an ill-preserved hooker. She stared, breathing heavily through her thin orangey lips. Then she folded her hands, used her knees to hold the steering wheel, and drove off, praying.

NVSQVAM succeeds in part because despite being a woman, Sterzinger absolutely nails the hopelessness and listlessness of the average middle-aged American man. It sounds condescending to write that, but being able to write convincing characters of the opposite sex is a tough job for any novelist, and Sterzinger accomplishes it with aplomb.

In fact, she arguably does it a little too well.

Lester is basically a mash-up of Ferdinand Bardamu and Walter Mitty, with a dash of Eduard Limonov in It’s Me, Eddie (namely the parts where he’s having gay sex with homeless black men). The defining theme in his life is his utter powerlessness over everything and everyone he encounters. Bossed around by his wife and son Martin, the latter of whom reminds me of Oskar Schell from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (in that Sterzinger depicts how annoying a kid like that would be in real life), Lester constantly fantasizes about Martin meeting a grisly end. Too effete for the Bible Belt bubbas who dominate Carbondale, he hides out in the town’s only gay bar, and his escapades with a teenage girl he meets wearing one of his old band’s T-shirts is almost Pleasant Hell-esque in its patheticness:

“Oh, you mean that shirt? The really grungy one? You mean that was a real band?” She laughed a laugh which sounded unnervingly like David Letterman’s. “I found that shirt in somebody’s trash. I thought it was a gag. Like, who would have a band with a name that stupid? And the guys on it… three of ‘em looked like what the cat dragged in, and then there was this ludicrously cute little dude who looked like he belonged in some Goth boy-band from a parallel universe. That was a real band? Oh, wow, did you ever see them?”

Sterzinger’s lurching, Celinean prose is both descriptive yet economical, fleshing out every detail of the Reichartsens’ wretched world. While the book is fairly long (over 300 pages with cramped, small font), it never feels like she’s padding the length out or wasting time, and there are laugh-out-loud moments every other page. NVSQVAM is augmented by snarky footnotes from the narrator—who dictates the story like it’s happening in the distant past—explaining various pop cultural references we take for granted, such as this definition of Walmart:

Ubiquitous ‘superstore’ selling cheap merchandise to Americans at the expense of their jobs. Founded by Sam Walton, a poor bastard who became a rich bastard through personal qualities which are, fortunately, lacking in most moral beings.

The first part of NVSQVAM concerns Lester’s attempts to deal with his terminal depression, his consistent failure to obtain quality antidepressants from his psychiatrist (who cites his constant drinking as proof that he’ll just get addicted), and his visits to his father and in-laws for Christmas, the latter of which ends in a surreal reunion with his former bandmates. Throughout the novel, Lester desperately pines to return to Chicago, land of his youth, with his actions and those of the people around him dragging him further and further away from his goal. I won’t spoil the second half of the book, only to say that Lester’s dreams come true… in a twisted, Monkey’s Paw fashion.

And even in this, Lester is completely impotent, his life dictated by everyone else around him.

That, if anything, is the defining theme of NVSQVAM: the lingering unease that Generation X has with American culture and themselves. Sterzinger’s writing is shot through with GenX tropes: punk rock, David Letterman, Nirvana, and anti-consumerism among them. Lester constantly finds himself in conflict with everyone younger or older than him, whether it’s his overly serious, domineering father or his ditzy pseudo-hipster paramour Cyndi. Sterzinger’s writing reminds me of a secular, more stridently anti-natalist version of her friend Andy Nowicki; indeed, Nowicki once characterized Sterzinger’s canon as “anti-life fiction.”

And despite this religious gap, Nowicki’s and Sterzinger’s work is more similar than different; both feature self-immolating loser protagonists who spiral into mental illness in response to the world rejecting them.

Generation X was both with one foot in the old world and one in the new. They were eyewitnesses to the final collapse of the traditionalist West and its usurpation by cultural Marxism; anti-white multiculturalism, feminism and consumerism. Pretty much every work of literature or art that came from GenX is defined by this discomfort and alienation from the world, whether it’s the existential nausea of Kurt Cobain or the rudderless hedonism of Mark Ames.

As a Millennial, I’m never going to be able to understand this alienation in anything more than an abstract sense. Millennials are alienated, that much is obvious, but the particular kind of alienation in Heart Killer and NVSQVAM (Nowhere) is GenX’s alone. I can see on an intellectual level why, for example, Andy Nowicki opposes the self-improvement “game” culture of the manosphere to the point where he would endorse masturbation over fornication, but I instinctively reject his conclusions; my psychological makeup simply can’t find them palatable.

It’s a generational gap that will never be traversed.

Nonetheless, I can gaze into the abyss of GenX with riveting, hilarious novels like NVSQVAM (Nowhere). As a comic yet poignant expression of an entire generation’s angst, NVSQVAM is top-notch and an absolute necessity for your collection. - Matt Forney