THE NEXT SCOTT NADELSON a Life in Progress

by Scott Nadelson

Beginning in the summer of 2004, Scott Nadelson’s life fell apart. His fiancée left him a month before their planned wedding for another woman who made her living performing as a drag king. He moved into a drafty attic. His car’s brakes went out. He learned that his cat was dying. Over the next two years, he’d struggle, with equivocal and sometimes humiliating results, to get back on his feet, in the process re-examining his past to understand his present circumstances.The Next Scott A Life in Progress is a literary self-portrait that revolves around the dissolution of a relationship but encompasses the long process of a young man’s halting self-discovery. Exploring episodes from the life of its author/narrator marked by failure, suffering, and hope, as well as literary and cultural influence, the book weighs the things that make us want to give up against the things that keep us going. Though many of the pieces are comic and self-deprecating—some self-lacerating—they are above all meditations on the nature of the self and the way it can be constructed through memory, desire, and the imagination. Together they form a larger narrative, a search for fulfillment and identity in a life often governed by fear.With humor and unflinching honesty, Scott Nadelson scrutinizes his life to discover who he is and finds just how elusive such a discovery can be. To read the resulting book is to join him on a personal journey that is thoughtful, surprising, occasionally hilarious, and unapologetically human.

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

First published February 1, 2013

About the author

Scott Nadelson grew up in northern New Jersey before escaping to Oregon, where he has lived for the past eighteen years. He has published three collections of short stories--Aftermath, The Cantor's Daughter, and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories--and a memoir, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress. His newest books are the novel, Between You and Me and the story collection The Fourth Corner of the World (Engine Books, 2018). He is the winner of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and the Oregon Book Award for short fiction, and his work has been cited as notable in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays anthologies. Nadelson teaches creative writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Reviews

[kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book was a struggle to chomp through, both due to the never ending awkwardness and my knowing of Nadelson (i’m sorry professor). so know that a lot of my thoughts may be biased. this book felt disjointed in it’s scattered manner. i didn’t realize until reading the reviews that it was a series of essays (my bad), in those essays i felt that the time line was scattered and confusing. i also felt as though there was an overwhelming amount of penis talk, we also never really see the car break down or his cat die? however the book was funny and encompassed the painful awkwardness of love, online dating and growing up.

i’d lean towards a 3.5 as opposed to a 3 flat.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't read this like a book of short stories. I just plowed through it. Each chapter was published separately which I learned in the acknowledgements in the end, but each chapter is a story about Scott Nadelson in one phase of life or another.

So it's all short stories, but they blend together like a memoir or a confessional, kind of like reading someone's journal. There were times when I was embarrassed for Scott and I started to think of the narrator as someone I knew, really knew, because so much of a memoir is what's inside the authors mind with life events as a backdrop.

Scott, don't tell people how you tried to stay friends with the ex-fiancee who left you for a drag king. Don't tell everyone you took that film class with that you lied about your mom being sick to get out of making an overly politicized documentary. Seriously, don't be so honest about depression and high school and being broke and having dead-end jobs and suffering unrequited love.

Now I'm thinking about the good and bad that was high school, the confusing relationships I've never talked about and that nagging feeling that I should be doing something with my life other than what I am doing but I don't know what.

Then again, I'm also reminded of the characters that have wandered in and out of my life that I never recognized as such. In The Next Scott Nadelson I got detailed commentary about "an aging hippie wearing a yarmulke woven with the colors of the Jamaican flag" and a bookstore clerk with a rose tattoo and a little Vietnamese woman who loves peonies and collects recycling from the trash on the street.

It's a great reminder that all the people we meet, the books we read and the things we do and don't do, good and bad, make us who we are. Now that I've read all about Nadelson's past I feel like being a little more honest with myself about my own.

[delaney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m hesitant to write a review on this book as much as i am to rate it at all because Scott is my professor. it would end up being closer to a 3.5 rather than a flat 3. i thought it was entertaining, though personally it was awkward at times for me to read because of how i know him in real life. it was funny and managed to keep my attention more than a lot of other books i’ve read- which is an accomplishment because i’ve never been much of a nonfiction reader. there was a good balance of humor and serious meditations, though it definitely could have used less talk about penises (sorry professor).

[Rowan Spangler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well!! I actually thought this was very well written, contemplative and intelligent without being hard to read. I laughed out loud and cried, once. The book had some excellent points about being a writer and a person with big emotions, and I definitely feel inspired to write more.
HOWEVER. Your penis should never be an overarching motif. Sorry, Scott.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scott Nadelson has only read three Philip Roth books (of course some would say Roth is formulaic and thus Nadelson has read all he needs), but be prepared for a pretty unapologetic Roth homage in the title story. I say, "be prepared" because if you're ready for it you won't do what I did, which is put the book away for a couple weeks shortly after reading the line, "an aging hippie wearing a yarmulke woven with the colors of the Jamaican flag came up to me and growled, 'You're the next fucking Philip Roth.'" But it's worth it to keep reading, because Nadelson really does tie it all together nicely later with two things: (1) with his father's silence, then response: "Those are big words to live up to, kiddo. You've got a lot of work ahead of you." (It helped that his dad was reading one of my favorite thought-experiments, Roth's "The Plot Against America," which I love almost as much as Philip K. Dick's treatment in "The Man in the High Castle"). Then (2), in the next paragraph Nadelson explains that his penis (remember, this is a Roth homage, intentional or not) seems to prefer "light hair and pale skin and high cheekbones, and when I finished, exhausted and ashamed, I thought that maybe fucking Philip Roth had my number after all." This, after comparing a JDate profile as "a particularly cute one in the mix, though she looked too much like one of my cousins for me to imagine kissing her, or taking off her clothes" (in fact, it's not the only notation of "too much like one of my cousins" in the book). This is not typical Nadelson. Although his books have always spoken plainly about sex, they haven't been this Roth-esquely navel-gazing. Of course, it's a memoir, so it's supposed to be navel-gazing, I get it.
"Three Muses" and "I'm Your Man," are more like conversations with an old friend who you haven't seen in a few years, an old friend who has become wise in the interim, who has found peace. There are howls of deep personal sadness in them. Echoes of this beautiful line, on seeing the woman for whom his fiancee had left him: "And with these feelings came a thought that had been absent from my mind for so long I'd almost forgotten it, and I welcomed it like an old friend: How ridiculous life was! How wonderfully absurd!"
"Pal Man" speaks to Nadelson's terrible taste in women. "Wasn't passion always an admirable thing, even if hers was a little simplistic?" Nope. The foreshadowing in this story is intoxicating, until his new love-interest "started talking about the propaganda machine of the media and the Israel lobby." Holy shit. I found myself yelling at the book, "Get out now!" But of course he can't, she's a nut, and it's wonderful reading. My favorite part of this story was, "when she grabbed my arm, I recoiled," and I breathed a sigh of relief when the author finally extricated himself from the film project. That's how this book is for me -- excellent story-telling and writing that makes me feel a stone in my gut and breathe a sigh of relief when it's over. It's hard not to care deeply about the misguided and sad and triumphant and borderline-sane and self-destructive souls that populate the stories. And of course, it's comforting to remind myself -- when the anxiety gets to be too much -- that the author turns out fine in the end, in a happy marriage. An excellent and engaging read.

[Amanda Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I won this from a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.

This was a rough one to get through. On one hand, Nadelson has moments of wonderful writing and beautiful clarity in his work. On the other is the first 100 pages, which consist mostly of the words penis and fuck.

I spent a lot of this book feeling as if someone was whining at me, and truly not caring about Nadelson, his life, or any of his tribulations. In fact, if I was sitting in front of him right now, I'd probably say something along the lines of, "Life hands us all a bunch of crap, many times in one big bucketful. Whining about that crap in the form of a short story will not win you awards and should not win you fans."

I will say that there were two stories within the book that really had merit, Three Muses, about Nadelson's work at a literary organization and his introduction to three well known authors, and his reflection on the meaning of Kafka's work to his own life. Both of these works were fresh and meaningful, with less mention of "six months before my fiancee left me for a woman" every thirty seconds.

Overal, about a 2.75. There's just not a lot here to draw you in, and I mostly found myself not truly wanting to finish. A lot of times, reading this was a chore.

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like me, Scott Nadelson fears he's cursed his cat with a disease that runs in his family. Like me, Scott Nadelson sometimes believes himself to be a doomed loser and sometimes believes he's a genius. He has this thought, which I have also had: "I woke to face another day and thought, with relief, It could be worse. And then I thought, with a chill rising from the very depths of my being, It could be worse."

So maybe I am the next Scott Nadelson?

I loved this memoir, a collection of connected essays about reading and loneliness and the ideas people have about themselves. (Unlike Scott Nadelson, I don't spend four hours a day reading Kafka. But I like the idea of myself as someone who might.) He's simultaneously very self-conscious and very sincere; he's ruthless in documenting his own pretensions and flights of fancy, whether trying to impress a girl in his documentary filmmaking class or imagining the impact he's made on a Ukrainian student. The connections--with women and students--do come, but never in the ways or at the times literature has taught him to expect. This is a story about getting tripped up by your own stories about yourself, and being saved by stories about others. It is exactly what I needed.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was recommended by my SIL who used to live in Portland. She was acquainted with the author when his fiancé left him. I liked this book well enough. It was well written, you know exactly how he felt being alone in his attic apartment. I appreciated the honesty. I dislike when people try to make their lives sound perfect (yes, someone specific comes to mind) and really it isn't. There are ups and downs. It's not meant to be even keel...that would be a bore. So Mr. Nadelson's brutal honesty was much appreciated. That being said, if he was my teacher I don't think I could look at him while he was lecturing without being a little embarrassed for him. Really masturbating makes it onto your daily routine? Daily? Maybe you have to be a guy to get this. And you really look at every girl you met with those thoughts? Again, I'm guessing you have to have male anatomy for this to make sense. But I like that there are men out there that are brave enough to admit they were labeled an honorary lesbian. And that they cry in public. Glad to see him happily married in the end.

[Clay Cassells · Rating 5 out of 5]

'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.'

With that opening line, Scott Nadelson drew me into his collection, a wistful evocation of the uncomfortable period preceding adulthood when you find yourself stuck, when expectations of life's path are confounded and you're forced to reset. 'The Next Scott Nadelson' is a fairly melancholy book, but the author infuses the book with such humor and perspective that it never wallows in self-pity. The remarkable clarity of Nadelson's prose kept me completely engaged in the work. Primarily a memoir--although it also includes a couple of essays that entwine nicely with the biographical work--TNSN resonated with me thoroughly. I really loved this book. Highly recommended.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was a huge insight to the male mind haha. No it really was a good book. It really shocked me that it's a real life story with a happy ending! I like it! I give props to Scott for literally throwing his life into writing and allowing others to read about very intimate emotions. Well written Mr. Nadelson.

[Katrina McCollough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very very honest.