American Book Review

Matthew Roberson's latest novel, Impotent, is provocative and challenging, though readers coming from Carver's School of No Gimmicks might get edgy. There's typographical horseplay aplenty: narratives in double and triple columns, text boxes like pop-up ads, ubiquitous footnotes, and enough white space for another book. Some experimental fiction can feel like watching a hair-band concert; the flashpots and makeup distract from so-so vocals and plodding guitar riffs. But Impotent isn't simply sleight of hand; it's timely and poignant.

Fiction, whether experimental, mainstream, contemporary, or a moldy oldie, should move the reader. If the author's intent isn't emotional manipulation, there are other prose options—manifestos, criticism, grocery lists. Fiction has to make readers feel—sympathy, anguish, remorse, humor, boredom, frustration—and Impotent does. Roberson reminded me one writer's gimmick (Laurence Sterne's black page, James Joyce's portmanteaus, Ralph Moody's italics) is another writer's essential element of storytelling. There are times when typography works to heighten narrative and make palpable the characters' circumstances. Roberson's cast suffers the familiar woes of our neighbors, friends, and family. Impotent is mimetic in my favorite way—Roberson holds the mirror of art up to the reader, and it's difficult not to recognize the reflection.

Impotent, despite the cover declaration, isn't a novel, not in the sense we follow a central protagonist along some grand arc. This is a collection of stories built around a host of contemporary Americans subservient to the pharmaceutical industry, rendered nameless in a Kafkaesque maze of insurance industry forms (characters are indicated by capital letters—I. for Insured, S. for Spouse, D. for Dependent, and so on). Some of Roberson's most effective moments are when he highlights not simply how dependent we are on drugs but how the current American workplace forces people to make hard choices about child care, marital relationships, and finances. From working-class roofers to educational copywriters to high-priced private attorneys, Impotent is the right title for the powerlessness Roberson's characters frequently face and rightfully feel.

The chapters are frequently split with subheaders of brand-name drugs, always followed by the trademark and footnoted with warning labels and drug interaction information in a thicket of pharmacology-speak worthy of Lewis Carroll's caterpillar. Roberson even supplies Web addresses for drug and disease info, as obsessively as any Easton Ellis character peppers us with designer labels. Reading Impotent made me feel guilty taking an Advil®, but then again, I'm not dependent on Paxil® or any other laboratory concoction. Roberson made me wary of every jaunty television ad we inevitably encounter, oddly bathtubbed couples and happily continent middle-agers alike.

Roberson uses his fascination with typographical tricks to enhance the plight of his characters. A section on attention-deficit disorder, using a double-entry narrative told entirely in dialogue over a wallpaper of faded ADHD information, surprised me. A challenge to eyesight and patience (as are many of the tiny, tiny footnotes, too—fonts shrink and expand throughout Impotent), to follow the twin storyline, readers must turn the book sideways and ignore the ghost-text behind the main text and decide how they want to read the plot—bouncing back and forth between the two situations or reading one straight down and then returning to read the other. It's reminiscent of Cris Mazza's Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? (1991), and while I initially resented the author's choice, seemingly discouraging me from a straightforward engagement with the painful dilemma of countless parents—how to handle a child who can't function in a school environment, who can't behave, let alone read or play a board game—the form serves a purpose here, to mimic the distracted attention of a person suffering from the disorder.

Roberson uses less elaborate typography to good effect elsewhere: the comparative lists a new father makes as he resentfully weighs the tasks he or his wife have done ("He just wanted to know: Who did more?") followed by the judgment...