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Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects
In 2013, Daniel Nester's estranged father died penniless and alone in a small apartment in Tucson. The news brings back a flood of memories about Mike Nester, an enigmatic truck driver with a genius IQ, who influences Daniel's worldview with conspiracy theories, philosophy books, and something called "The Nester Curse." Told in short chapters, SHADER: 99 NOTES ON CAR WASHES, MAKING OUT IN CHURCH, GRIEF, AND OTHER UNLEARNABLE SUBJECTS is a semi-comic coming-of-age story of a music-obsessed Catholic boy who searches for a new identity outside of Maple Shade, N.J., a blue-collar town straight out of a Bruce Springsteen song and where Martin Luther King, Jr. was once thrown out of a bar at gunpoint. The town's rough-and-tumble inhabitants, called Shaders, don't suffer record nerds like Daniel gladly, and eventually punk rock and poetry saves his life. A story of redemption and working through grief, SHADER tells the story of what it means to leave a place that never leaves you.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
316 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 15, 2015
34 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Nester
14 books47 followersDaniel Nester is the author most recently of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects (99: The Press 2015). Previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II (Soft Skull, 2003 and 2004), and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2014), which he edited. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Morning News, The Rumpus, Best American Poetry, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 6, 2016
This unconventionally structured memoir is as funny as it is tender, and it’s plenty of both. The honest, frequently self-deprecating narrative spans the author’s entire life, focusing on his childhood and teen years and his complicated relationship with his late father. 80s nostalgists like this reader adored the frequent pit stops in that neon-tinged decade, and the short chapters, once one adjusts to the rhythm, allow for a unique, panoramic, mirrorball of insight into the anxieties of family and identity.
April 11, 2016
A very quick read I picked up because I live one town over from Maple Shade.
I warmed to this book as I read it, annoyed, at first, by the structure of these small chapters that seemed to end just as they were beginning to get interesting. But Nester takes a very careful approach to his autobiography, balancing a raw depiction of his difficult childhood with a strident avoidance of self-pity all the while interspersing the tale with humorous coming-of-age anecdotes.
Difficult to put down.
I warmed to this book as I read it, annoyed, at first, by the structure of these small chapters that seemed to end just as they were beginning to get interesting. But Nester takes a very careful approach to his autobiography, balancing a raw depiction of his difficult childhood with a strident avoidance of self-pity all the while interspersing the tale with humorous coming-of-age anecdotes.
Difficult to put down.
November 17, 2018
When I picked up Daniel Nester’s memoir, Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects, the first thing I noticed was the 1980s cyber space retro cover design reminiscent of a decade that brought us classics like Tron, Star Man, and Battlestar Galactica, and an era that launched us, ready or not, into the digital age. Is this cover an indication that when we turn the page, we will leap with Nester into a futuristic world? Well, no, not exactly, and yet, in a way, yes. On the one hand, Nester’s memoir depicts experiences in his life that exhilarated him, broke him, introduced him to love, lust, pain, and heartbreak, shaping his identity on the path from boyhood to manhood in a dysfunctional family with an absent father. On the other hand, as Nester describes in his first note sitting in the present filming his two daughters who he instructs to say, “I am having a wonderful childhood” and “You’re a great dad,” the book is about Nester rebuilding shattered bridges between the past and present in a way that defies time and space, creating possibilities for a better future.
Growing up in a shady part of New Jersey, aptly called Maple Shade, a poor blue collar town sandwiched between Cherry Hill and Mount Laurel (the names say it all), Nester knows poverty and the strangle-hold it can have on its communities, families, and individuals. He creates an intricate and complex plot that draws on painful experiences that seem as fresh and raw now as they were when he experienced them in the 80s. Nester’s father Michael Nester was a Navy man who couldn’t hold down a job, and his mother Patti was bent on keeping up appearances. When money got so tight, all the Nesters had to keep them warm was a kerosene heater that doubled as a stove upon which to heat up tea: “Light shone through the heater’s grate up on the ceiling. It narrowed into a starry circle as the wick ran through the kerosene tank. Every couple of hours one of us got out from under the blankets to open the door and let clean air in…. Out in the garage, kerosene spurted on me as I squeezed the pump into the tank. The smell seeped into my school clothes, shoes, and socks.” This is the same kid who spent three years saving up for a moped only to have it stolen in three weeks. At sixteen, Nester already felt the smallness of his life sucking him into a black hole like “the punchline of a cosmic joke.”
In a memoir in which other family members’ lives are delicately intertwined with his own, particularly his father’s, Nester tells us about him through his actions; it is his actions and Nester’s empathy for feelings of deep isolation and lack of self-worth that drive the plot:
My dad considered himself a Westerner in exile. But exiled, why? Each question I asked him led to another question. Nights outside, Dad and I took turns looking through the telescope, up at Jupiter, its red swirls just visible in the South Jersey sky. We talked about how small we were in the universe, how very, very small. “So my son, what did you do today to justify your existence in the universe?” He liked to ask unanswerable questions like this until the day he left. I could never provide an adequate answer.
Michael Nester died in 2013, a broken man. It was an event that acted as a catalyst for this memoir. In a way, Shader, separated into three acts, channels Nester’s need to provide an answer to unanswerable questions, to show that his existence is justified; and yet, here, in this moment, he also sees his smallness against a man who, like the planet Jupiter, seems larger than life, and who is artfully portrayed in a tragic scene with a questionable hero.
Reading Shader is like looking through a telescope at the red swirls of Nester’s life but of an era, too. This book is infused with many scattered notes of comedy. After all, this is the 80s Nester is writing about, and he lived it. The landscape of Nester’s memoir is primarily set against a 1980s backdrop of great rock albums (and not so great rock albums), cut-off jeans or tight jeans (seemingly your only options), the mullet, and shoulder pads that used up more material than the rest of the outfit. It is in the 80s that Nester also discovers the band Queen and in excitement reaches out to its fan club in England to learn that there are two people in all of America who are interested in being part of it – him, and the previous American to call about the fan club … him.
Nester takes us back in time to relive a cheesy but awesome decade, and we hear about Nester’s dramatic antics in the process. He writes about killer lawnmowers, ex-girlfriends, getting arrested, lipstick fights, and confessions (and there are many confessions), among other things.
What’s particularly appealing about Shader is that it breaks from convention. By creating this memoir as a collection of 99 notes, Nester is able to manipulate each and every note to create its own sound. As a true 80s rocker, Nester rocks the world of memoir and turns it on its axis. He approaches his material in innovative ways: bending and reshaping forms, experimenting with forms within forms as he skillfully weaves narrative structures, points of view, time and space. The experiences themselves he shatters into fragments, disperses like stars, and then pulls out the telescope to take a closer at the constantly moving images, forms, and narratives in his life, and all on their own unique trajectories to Jupiter.
Growing up in a shady part of New Jersey, aptly called Maple Shade, a poor blue collar town sandwiched between Cherry Hill and Mount Laurel (the names say it all), Nester knows poverty and the strangle-hold it can have on its communities, families, and individuals. He creates an intricate and complex plot that draws on painful experiences that seem as fresh and raw now as they were when he experienced them in the 80s. Nester’s father Michael Nester was a Navy man who couldn’t hold down a job, and his mother Patti was bent on keeping up appearances. When money got so tight, all the Nesters had to keep them warm was a kerosene heater that doubled as a stove upon which to heat up tea: “Light shone through the heater’s grate up on the ceiling. It narrowed into a starry circle as the wick ran through the kerosene tank. Every couple of hours one of us got out from under the blankets to open the door and let clean air in…. Out in the garage, kerosene spurted on me as I squeezed the pump into the tank. The smell seeped into my school clothes, shoes, and socks.” This is the same kid who spent three years saving up for a moped only to have it stolen in three weeks. At sixteen, Nester already felt the smallness of his life sucking him into a black hole like “the punchline of a cosmic joke.”
In a memoir in which other family members’ lives are delicately intertwined with his own, particularly his father’s, Nester tells us about him through his actions; it is his actions and Nester’s empathy for feelings of deep isolation and lack of self-worth that drive the plot:
My dad considered himself a Westerner in exile. But exiled, why? Each question I asked him led to another question. Nights outside, Dad and I took turns looking through the telescope, up at Jupiter, its red swirls just visible in the South Jersey sky. We talked about how small we were in the universe, how very, very small. “So my son, what did you do today to justify your existence in the universe?” He liked to ask unanswerable questions like this until the day he left. I could never provide an adequate answer.
Michael Nester died in 2013, a broken man. It was an event that acted as a catalyst for this memoir. In a way, Shader, separated into three acts, channels Nester’s need to provide an answer to unanswerable questions, to show that his existence is justified; and yet, here, in this moment, he also sees his smallness against a man who, like the planet Jupiter, seems larger than life, and who is artfully portrayed in a tragic scene with a questionable hero.
Reading Shader is like looking through a telescope at the red swirls of Nester’s life but of an era, too. This book is infused with many scattered notes of comedy. After all, this is the 80s Nester is writing about, and he lived it. The landscape of Nester’s memoir is primarily set against a 1980s backdrop of great rock albums (and not so great rock albums), cut-off jeans or tight jeans (seemingly your only options), the mullet, and shoulder pads that used up more material than the rest of the outfit. It is in the 80s that Nester also discovers the band Queen and in excitement reaches out to its fan club in England to learn that there are two people in all of America who are interested in being part of it – him, and the previous American to call about the fan club … him.
Nester takes us back in time to relive a cheesy but awesome decade, and we hear about Nester’s dramatic antics in the process. He writes about killer lawnmowers, ex-girlfriends, getting arrested, lipstick fights, and confessions (and there are many confessions), among other things.
What’s particularly appealing about Shader is that it breaks from convention. By creating this memoir as a collection of 99 notes, Nester is able to manipulate each and every note to create its own sound. As a true 80s rocker, Nester rocks the world of memoir and turns it on its axis. He approaches his material in innovative ways: bending and reshaping forms, experimenting with forms within forms as he skillfully weaves narrative structures, points of view, time and space. The experiences themselves he shatters into fragments, disperses like stars, and then pulls out the telescope to take a closer at the constantly moving images, forms, and narratives in his life, and all on their own unique trajectories to Jupiter.
November 29, 2015
I've always loved Nester's sensibility—wry, curious, unflinching—and this book doesn't disappoint. It'll keep you up late, gobbling up just one more chapter, and then just one more. What a pleasure to spend a few days in the Shade in the company of the author. I miss it already.
September 5, 2017
An enjoyable read. It is a memoir of is youth in 80s New Jersey. A lot of it was funny and wise. A very fine book.
January 18, 2023
I’ll give this book a proper review once I get home. Coupled with a vacation, this book reinvigorated me in ways I unexpected.
July 19, 2016
Author Daniel Nester latest book Shader is a memoir about growing up, over and over again, maybe in perpetuity. It’s about being a record-collecting nerd in the 1980s, and the destiny deciding dangers of lawnmowers and poets who work at carwashes and how sex is usually tragic and hilarious when you’re young. It’s also a really funny book about death, anger, and never feeling like you belong, ever, especially in the place and with the people who raised you. And the later realization that everyone feels that way too. …but seriously, funny book. It’ll also cut you close to the bone when you least expect it to. The event that triggers the author’s big look back is the recent death of his estranged father Mike Nester. Nester’s fascinating and frustrating father hangs over the entire book like some Col. Kurtz type of wraith, becoming even more strange and mythic in his absence. His presence pervades the work even after he abandons the author and his family halfway through the book. Mostly because the damaging impact of his fathering is felt in every misstep his son takes later when tasked with trying to raise himself.
But again, this book is funny as hell. The humor here elevates what could otherwise devolve into a flat dirge of a rough coming of age peppered with justifiable anger at a failed patriarch. This never happens as you read Shader. Nester makes it a point to constantly keep himself in check, never wallowing and always looking at things through the eyes of others whenever possible. Even his father’s.
The title Shader, (rendered in a very 80s, very opening for Dokken at the state fair font for the cover) refers to a self-applied handle that residents of the working class town of Maple Shade New Jersey have taken to using. Most of the story takes place here, with the author, learning about his ever shifting role in the grand cosmos by proxy in South Jersey. There are a few other locations in the book but none make more of an impression than Tucson Arizona. Seeing as Tucson is actually the place where I did a lot of my own growing up it intrigued me to see an East coaster’s take on it. Equally intriguing was my view of Nester as an east coaster at all, knowing that I spent the first 10 years of my life mostly in Pennsylvania.
But that’s another thing that works with Shader, as much as it’s about the particular peculiarities and nuances of Nester’s hometown it’s also about the idea of the “home town.” Anyone who’s ever moved away from the region that they hail from knows the ambivalence you feel toward the spot that made you what you are. Hell, people who put down roots in their hometowns probably feel it even deeper. But Nester nails the odd sense, distinct to those who leave and come back occasionally, of obsession and perpetual mystery about the place you should already know more about than anywhere else. How can there always seem to be more to learn about where you grew up? Or the people you grew up with? Why is it endlessly imperative that we ask our relatives and old school friends about the same old incidents? Are we trying to learn something new? To study every inch of our personal Zapruder films in hopes to finally reach that aha moment that disproves the magic bullet theories which flimsily tried to explain the weirdness of our childhoods? Or do we just want to relive those old days because even when they were the worst of times, seeing as we had more life ahead of us than ever, fittingly, we never felt more alive?
However, there’s one aspect of Shader which some readers might not be able to relate to directly and is one of its most powerful features; the real darkness and brokenness to Nester’s relationship with his father. The man was a truck driver with a genius IQ who encouraged free thinking and philosophical study in his children; he also may have harbored Nazi sympathies and definitely like many fathers of his or any time had some fucked up views on women that their sons would have to discard in order to avoid their father’s fates.
What I liked most about all this is that despite the book revolving around the death of his admittedly damaged but charismatic father, there is a careful effort at making his mother and his sister and their views on all topics pertinent just as compelling and important as his or his father’s own. It’s a human flaw to always be more interested in what we don’t have, hence the popularity of stories revolving around problems with the father and/or absent fathers. But by the end of Shader Nester comes round to focusing instead on what he does have: a mother who loved him and raised him on her own as best she could; and a family of his own which represent a chance to be the father to his own children that he never had himself. The author seems to understand, on both counts, that not everyone can say the same.
But again, this book is funny as hell. The humor here elevates what could otherwise devolve into a flat dirge of a rough coming of age peppered with justifiable anger at a failed patriarch. This never happens as you read Shader. Nester makes it a point to constantly keep himself in check, never wallowing and always looking at things through the eyes of others whenever possible. Even his father’s.
The title Shader, (rendered in a very 80s, very opening for Dokken at the state fair font for the cover) refers to a self-applied handle that residents of the working class town of Maple Shade New Jersey have taken to using. Most of the story takes place here, with the author, learning about his ever shifting role in the grand cosmos by proxy in South Jersey. There are a few other locations in the book but none make more of an impression than Tucson Arizona. Seeing as Tucson is actually the place where I did a lot of my own growing up it intrigued me to see an East coaster’s take on it. Equally intriguing was my view of Nester as an east coaster at all, knowing that I spent the first 10 years of my life mostly in Pennsylvania.
But that’s another thing that works with Shader, as much as it’s about the particular peculiarities and nuances of Nester’s hometown it’s also about the idea of the “home town.” Anyone who’s ever moved away from the region that they hail from knows the ambivalence you feel toward the spot that made you what you are. Hell, people who put down roots in their hometowns probably feel it even deeper. But Nester nails the odd sense, distinct to those who leave and come back occasionally, of obsession and perpetual mystery about the place you should already know more about than anywhere else. How can there always seem to be more to learn about where you grew up? Or the people you grew up with? Why is it endlessly imperative that we ask our relatives and old school friends about the same old incidents? Are we trying to learn something new? To study every inch of our personal Zapruder films in hopes to finally reach that aha moment that disproves the magic bullet theories which flimsily tried to explain the weirdness of our childhoods? Or do we just want to relive those old days because even when they were the worst of times, seeing as we had more life ahead of us than ever, fittingly, we never felt more alive?
However, there’s one aspect of Shader which some readers might not be able to relate to directly and is one of its most powerful features; the real darkness and brokenness to Nester’s relationship with his father. The man was a truck driver with a genius IQ who encouraged free thinking and philosophical study in his children; he also may have harbored Nazi sympathies and definitely like many fathers of his or any time had some fucked up views on women that their sons would have to discard in order to avoid their father’s fates.
What I liked most about all this is that despite the book revolving around the death of his admittedly damaged but charismatic father, there is a careful effort at making his mother and his sister and their views on all topics pertinent just as compelling and important as his or his father’s own. It’s a human flaw to always be more interested in what we don’t have, hence the popularity of stories revolving around problems with the father and/or absent fathers. But by the end of Shader Nester comes round to focusing instead on what he does have: a mother who loved him and raised him on her own as best she could; and a family of his own which represent a chance to be the father to his own children that he never had himself. The author seems to understand, on both counts, that not everyone can say the same.
December 20, 2015
Nester's Shader is a gorgeous, soul-searching, intimate book. I did miss my subway stop once and almost missed many times while re-living mullet memories and awkward music fantasies. I also had to stop reading many times because it's hard to read when you are shaking with tears of laughter in your eyes... references of Leo Buscaglia and Kajagoogoo are haunting me... Nester brings a full range of complicated emotions to the family, friends and lovers he recalls from South Jersey; and this upstate New York girl with teen years in the '80s relates deeply to Nester's humor, wild-child fever and charm. A journey, an anthem, a tribute band of his own life, Shader is a concise personal and historic diary of a not so mad man.
October 4, 2016
I really loved Shader. It brought back memories of Winesburg, Ohio. I was fascinated and impressed with the structure, and how Nester was able to paint such a vivid and full picture of an entire town and childhood in separate "notes". Truly worth reading; I'll enjoy coming back to this book.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews