Quotidiana (review)

Patrick Madden is—in no particular order—a father, a singer, a convert to Mormonism, a guy who embarrasses his wife by wearing his socks pulled all the way up his calves even when wearing shorts, a former physics major, a fan of the band Rush, and one of the most compelling and skilled essayists working today. "Essayists," Madden writes in the essay that opens this collection, "are keen observers of the overlooked, the ignored, and the seemingly unimportant. They can make the mundane resplendent with their meditative insights." In the roughly 200 pages that follow that insight, Madden illustrates its truth with sophistication, intelligence, and a subtle wit that entertains without overwhelming his larger, more serious insights.

Scholars and fans of the personal essay are probably already well aware of Patrick Madden and his work, despite the fact that Quotidiana is his first book. His essay "A Sudden Pull behind the Heart" appeared in the first volume of The Best Creative Nonfiction, and his absolutely beautiful essay "On Laughter" (published in Quotidiana, in a revised form, as "Laughing") was a high-water mark in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007. But as impressive as his publication record is, Madden is perhaps best known for his work on his website—also called Quotidiana—which provides an indispensible collection of classical essays ranging from the fifth century (Seneca) to the twentieth century (Edith Stein), with plenty of examples from the form's most important practitioners: William Hazlitt, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Lamb, and, of course, our patron saint, Michel de Montaigne.

It's this commitment to classical essaying that informs Madden's voice and approach to his subject matter. A scene-filled, action-heavy narrative approach may be fine for a David Sedaris or Tobias Wolff, but Madden—like Montaigne, Hazlitt, and others before him—is interested in exploring a more internal landscape, where ideas have precedence over any type of constructed plot. His essays demonstrate the sense of freedom that accompanies a record of thought unencumbered by a devotion to an "inverted checkmark" approach to writing. At the same time, they reveal the depth of an intellect that is able to locate and illuminate connections between Montaigne, Brenda Miller, rock music, and the death of a high school classmate, all in one magnificent 32-page essay that some short-sighted reader, somewhere, must have told him was "too long for a literary magazine."

I've never met Patrick Madden in person—we've had some electronic correspondence over the past few years, but that's it—yet I still find it easy to imagine that he has probably heard advice to cut his prose or, even worse, to "show, don't tell." While this advice is always well-intentioned, it also, I think, misses the point of the essay, which is fundamentally diff erent from a short story (or most memoirs). It's to Madden's advantage that he either didn't hear, or chose to ignore such advice.

Madden seems just as concerned with math and science as he is literature and philosophy. His thoughts on fractal geometry are particularly interesting, because, really, an essay is a lot like a fractal—a small approximation of a larger whole. I don't have the background in mathematics to take this comparison much further, but I will point out that while Madden's essays seem often to share the same "component parts," or preoccupations—language, parenthood, music, religion, and, of course, the essay as a form—he consistently finds new ways to approach these subjects.

In what might be the most impressive essay in the collection, "Gravity and Distance," Madden begins with a song lyric from Rush—a band we already know has had a profound influence on Madden from earlier essays in the collection. We then delve into the heart of the essay, with its central theme that "there is a great difference between theory and practice," a truth that is beautifully revealed as Madden blends his meditations on mathematics, physics, and metaphysics with the story of his father...