Impotent: A Novel

by Matthew Roberson

Impotent  is a collection of moving stories about a time when "it is easier to get a refill on a prescription than approval for therapy" and individuals are reduced to letters on a medical chart. In revealing vignettes, Matthew Roberson clinically catalogs the hopes, dreams, and failures of people identified only through form-like abbreviations (C— for co-dependent, I— for Insured). In these "case studies," Roberson captures his subjects' lives poignantly by supplementing their diagnoses with unconventional footnotes, lists, and medicinal warnings. Each vignette exposes a different facet of our medicated society, humanizing a multitude of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, impotence, and dementia. In a world of domestic ennui, deadpan voices struggle to transcend numbness while simultaneously trying to manage the pain of living.  Impotent  is both important social commentary and engrossing fiction.

166 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2009

About the author

Matthew Roberson is the author of four novels—1998.6, Impotent, List, and the recently published campus novel Interim. He also edited the collection Musing the Mosaic: Approaches to Ronald Sukenick. His short fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Fiction International, Clackamas Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, Notre Dame Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. He lives and teaches in central Michigan.

Reviews

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard Matthew read from this book at AWP this year and I liked what I heard, so I bought this book. I think it's difficult to write a book that is innovative structurally, but also has a good story and some genuine emotion.
Also, after DFW I think it's hard to do the footnote and not be derivative or gimmicky. This book uses footnotes, but in a way that I found interesting, not intrusive, and not gimmicky.
I really like this book and while it might not be popular to say so, I thought it had a lot of heart.
Also it is, at its core, domestic. So you know I love that.
Recommended to readers with open minds.
It is, btw, a lot about prescription drugs.

[Darrin Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

So-called postmodern fiction -- that which allows the reader some choice in how he/she reads a text due to footnotes, lack of character names, and/or other structurally unconventional elements -- is often criticized for being cold, detached, and gimmicky.

I'm happy to say that Roberson's novel, which uses many structural innovations, is warm, connected, and not at all gimmicky. I was really blown away by the beauty of the prose, which often has a near-poetic efficiency and rhythm. The book is a series of vignettes -- character portraits that depict modern reality in all its absurd, mechanical, frightening, funny, and fragile forms. The people in this novel are all familiar in their daily triumphs and failures. The novel is hilarious, bleak, and, put simply, human, despite the inability of the characters to escape the persistent shadow of corporate narcotization. I highly recommend it!

[Robert]

Impotent achieves more of an emotional effect through its distance than many books do by allowing their characters to be known. Everyone is an initial here, and the narrator is cold and aloof--and that's precisely why the book is so emotionally wrenching. Judgments are not made, and the book is not colored by an authorial agenda--rather, it shows us the fallout of a medicated society, and leaves us to judge all of it, rather than just the positive or negative results.

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bizarre but so interesting and a quick read too! Not for everyone but it's form creates quite the different read on this story book about different people and their addiction (and not) to prescription drugs. Also, a lot of endnotes and footnotes. Not distracting at all. Check it out, ya'll! I'd re-read this!

[Caleb Tankersley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my review of this book at the awesome literary website Newpages.com:

http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/2...

[🐴 🍖]

yknow i've never once read a work of fiction and been like "man i'm glad that writer named all the characters after different letters of the alphabet." particularly when you're already creating narrative distance through, e.g., nested footnotes and not having any recurring characters section to section, i wasn't esp feeling that extra level of remove. (also i liked the last section better when it was called house mother normal by b.s. johnson.) all that being said the granularity of the depictions of home and office life is absolutely fantastic and the footnotes within footnotes thing is a technique i'd like to fool around w some myself... on to 1998.6!