John Henry Ryskamp - Throwing together patches of history, art theory, literary essay, cultural criticism, memoir, legal briefs, letters from the author to his editor, quotes from The Brothers Karamazov, two or three pages of actual story, and reams and reams of explication and justification of its own style and structure, 'Nature Studies', bills itself as the beginning of twenty-first-century art. Instead, what it ends up being is an accidental parody of postmodernism

John Henry Ryskamp, Nature Studies, Fiction Collective 2, 1998.


With affinities to the 1980s phenomenon of appropriation art, journalist and critic Ryskamp puts himself into his novel, much as Cindy Sherman poses in her own photography. Layered upon musings of hunting patterns of eagles and the geographical makeup of the Midwest are metatextual reflections on Crime and Punishment and Jane Eyre, among other books. The text proceeds at blender speed, dizzily mixing together famous names and quotes, such as those by Einstein, Ryskamp's "grandfather" and Bartok, who both in turn quote Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. Ryskamp leavens his pastiche with numerous reflections about his own role in the dawning of modernism (one favorite method is to relate his "dreams," in which he encounters Freud, Picasso and others), though the best sections are tongue-in-cheek descriptions of how the novel happens to be created from additions made to two essays, one on AZT and one on the New Bill of Rights. Overall, the book resembles the sort of nightmare one imagines having after reading too many issues of Art Forum successively. One suspects that the novel's audience will be limited to critics who will recognize obscure references to avant-garde esoterica. - Publishers Weekly


The poop sheet tells us that Ryskamp is a lawyer by trade which becomes more apparent as we drag ourselves through this trial by fire. Nature Studies is a riot --- not a riot ha-ha, unfortunately, but a riot of name-dropping and literary and classical references thrown in everywhere to let you know that the author has read everything, and is willing to upchuck it before us, before lunch, like the puppy's breakfast.
In the 75 pages we managed to get through there were loud and pesky references to Virginia Woolf, Einstein, Ho Chin Min, Baudelaire, Motherwell, Courbet, Mondrian, Christ, Martha Graham, Verlaine, Constable, Byron, Tagore, Sal Mineo, Montgomery Clift, Rilke, Jung, Freud, Joyce, Duchamp --- you name it. Every now and again, a tiny scintilla of wit would pop up, 
One might say, It was about time, rather as Derrida replied when asked, what does deconstruction do? "It depends."
But more often than not, this is a long, long Porkies for neo-intellectuals, vide: 
In fact, I should say that, intellectually speaking, the culture is "now" [now being the date of publication of the book you are reading] living in about the year 2038. Curious, ain't it? And which year are YOU living in, cher lecteur? [How the tiresome little weasel does torment his reader!!]
[Note: Brackets are courtesy of the author, not this reviewer: although the sentiments expressed are not too far distant from my own.]It makes one wonder how the editors of FC2 made it through this without going bonkers. One of them is, incidentally, dragged in on page 55: 
"Even your editor at FC2, Curt White, complains about it." So I am writing here (and you will see this in the manuscript of the book): Shut up.
The very same Curt White turns out to be not at all Shut Up but rather the composer of a most doubtful blurb featured at the top of the front cover comparing Nature Studies to Tristram Shandy which got us to wondering which Tristram Shandy they had in mind --- certainly not the funny one we read in college. Maybe he had another Stearne in mind --- one, more likely, more to his taste (with a few less vowels) named Howard.
A brief time in the arms of Nature Studies is not unlike being on a 42-day cruise from Bermuda to Borneo spending the meals trapped at the dinner table next to that big bore who can't quite figure out why all the rest of us seem so eager to abandon ship somewhere near the Sargasso Sea. - RR Doister


Throwing together patches of history, art theory, literary essay, cultural criticism, memoir, legal briefs, letters from the author to his editor, quotes from The Brothers Karamazov, two or three pages of actual story, and reams and reams of explication and justification of its own style and structure, John Henry Ryskamp’s debut novel, Nature Studies, bills itself as the beginning of twenty-first-century art. Instead, what it ends up being is an accidental parody of postmodernism, an inbred cousin to the works of Richard Grossman, William Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, and Theresa Cha.

Like those writers, Ryskamp plays with form, invents impossible combinations of events, warps time, and exploits high and low culture. But the novel reads more like Forrest Gump as written by Woody Allen’s “Irish Genius” Sean O’Shawn than like The Book of Lazarus or You Bright and Risen Angels. Here we have Ryskamp joking with Einstein, giving advice to Mondrian, fishing with Bartók, etc. It gets old fast.

Using postmodernism to distract the reader from the novel’s vast emptiness, Ryskamp employs every single literary trick he can think of, liberally stealing from Joyce, Calvino, Borges, Pynchon, and anyone else in his endless repertoire of references. At the same time, he mocks the very writers who influence him, accusing the best of them of “senseless virtuosity.”

Take a gander at this: “Actually the failure begins not at the Wake, but rather in Ulysses. That is why we begin to see that Joyce is a talent in search of a reason, that he runs everything into the ground, that he goes on endlessly and has no plot, that like Shakespeare he cannot tell a story (Shakespeare can’t spell either) and is too fond of the sound of his own voice.” He then goes on to “savage” Proust for his aimlessness. Either Ryskamp is too myopic to see that he’s damning his own faults—which is unlikely considering how self-conscious he is—or else he’s being ironic, in which case he’s trying to fool us into equating Nature Studies with other “senselessly virtuousic” works. I doubt anybody’s going to fall for it.

If it bears mentioning at all, the story buried in Nature Studies concerns a young boy who’s kidnapped and killed by an eagle, but you can find a more succinct and readable version of that story on the book’s back cover.

The only really enjoyable sections of Nature Studies are the ecological, legal, and political diatribes—which Ryskamp admits, in a lengthy discussion of the book’s composition and editing process, were added to fatten the book, at the request of his editor, Curtis White (who also contributes an absurdly hyperbolic blurb to the book’s cover). They culminate in a brief Vollmann-esque interview with a homeless man near the end of the book—clearly just a transcript, but incredibly moving nonetheless. So even though Ryskamp comes off as a self-parodying blowhard most of the time, at least his political heart is in the right place. Too bad his aesthetics aren’t. —David Wiley

John Henry Ryskamp's book, Nature Studies, is not without promise. On the whole Ryskamp writes well and often even elegantly, and he has many clever things to say. One goes along with him at first, learning about eagles (in some striking scenes) and the Big Star Lake area of Michigan. One even allows him his discursive digressions as he brings in Einstein and Gödel and Freud and many other famous souls. With time though the joke and jokes wear thin, the knowing asides too often preening (and often expressing foolish notions and opinions), the story too absent.
       Ryskamp is not a stupid man. And he writes well enough to have the makings of a decent author. But this novel is too playful, without either payoff or enough fun to make the effort worthwhile. After a while (and not too long a while) his mutterings and meanderings wear the reader down. If there were any kind of point to this shambles of a novel Ryskamp might be forgiven (we don't necessarily need a story, but we need something for our effort .....). As is, the book -- though sometimes clever (and often not) and written in a solid style -- is a disappointment.
       We're fans of FC2 (the Illinois State University publisher, Fiction Collective 2), and we understand that they might want to publish this as the interesting experiment than it almost is. Nevertheless, we cannot, in good conscience, recommend the book to any but those interested in modern, "experimental" fiction. Ryskamp's style and ideas have some redeeming qualities -- but not enough. - The Complete Review