This is a book I happened with no real idea what it was about or where it was going. Quickly I got sucked into the life of the protagonist, Lester Reichartsen, and could not put it down. The book is written with such high intensity, I kept reading just to find out what would happen next.

Set in a seedy area of Illinois (a bad place for a Wisconsin guy to be apparently) Lester is a guy that wakes up one morning, and realizes just how rotten his life is. Mistakenly believing himself to be mentally ill and falling apart, we are given a psychotic ride through the rough and tumble world that makes up his life, along with glimpses into his tormented past.

Lester was once an up and coming musician well on his way to becoming the next big thing at the time when Punk was riding high, Flash forward to his mid-30s, stuck in a loveless marriage, with an utter brat for a son (who happens to be a genius) trapped writing a dissertation for a job that he never wanted, surrounded by idiot students, it is fair to say that Lester is having a bit of a mid life crisis.

While Lester embarks on a journey where he constantly marvels at the utter insanity his reality has become, we begin to sense that underneath the surface, Lester is actually on a soul searching journey to find a part of himself long lost. Can Lester unravel all the factors for his deep depression high anxiety and utter inability to find contentment in life? Is it even possible?

Loaded with cultural references and observations about the world we live in, this book quickly reveals there is much multi-layered drama underneath the surface. A rather scathing indictment in its social commentary about life and the people who simply give up to be "normal" I actually see more existential depth at work than simply a humorous black comedy that many may mistake it for.

Quite an interesting page turner. The book also holds a mirror up to us older Generation X'ers like myself and dares to ask, "Isn't there a little bit of Lester in all of us? "

This is an absolutely must-read novel.

NVSQVAM trods familiar ground for me, as it's a tale of middle-class male ennui in the suburbs. The novel concerns Lester Reichartsen, poster boy for middle-aged white male failure, and his exile in a dull college town in southern Illinois (the town is not named, but I suspect Carbondale, based on geographical descriptions and the fact that Sterzinger herself is an alum of the school there). Kicked out of a punk band and guilted into marrying his girlfriend Evelyn after she gets pregnant, Lester resorts to grad school, last refuge of the middle-aged loser, while despising everything about his life.

NVSQVAM succeeds in part because despite being a woman, Sterzinger absolutely nails the hopelessness and listlessness of the average middle-aged American man. It sounds condescending to write that, but being able to write convincing characters of the opposite sex is a tough job for any novelist, and Sterzinger accomplishes it with aplomb. In fact, she arguably does it a little too well.

Lester is basically a mash-up of Ferdinand Bardamu and Walter Mitty, with a dash of Eduard Limonov in It's Me, Eddie (namely the parts where he's having gay sex with homeless black men). The defining theme in his life is his utter powerlessness over everything and everyone he encounters. Bossed around by his wife and son Martin, the latter of whom reminds me of Oskar Schell from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (in that Sterzinger depicts how annoying a kid like that would be in real life), Lester constantly fantasizes about Martin meeting a grisly end. Too effete for the Bible Belt bubbas who dominate Carbondale, he hides out in the town's only gay bar, and his escapades with a teenage girl he meets wearing one of his old band's T-shirts is almost Pleasant Hell-esque in its patheticness.

Sterzinger's lurching, Celinean prose is both descriptive yet economical, fleshing out every detail of the Reichartsens' wretched world. While the book is fairly long (over 300 pages with cramped, small font), it never feels like she's padding the length out or wasting time, and there are laugh-out-loud moments every other page. NVSQVAM is augmented by snarky footnotes from the narrator--who dictates the story like it's happening in the distant past--explaining various pop cultural references we take for granted.

The first part of NVSQVAM concerns Lester's attempts to deal with his terminal depression, his consistent failure to obtain quality antidepressants from his psychiatrist (who cites his constant drinking as proof that he'll just get addicted), and his visits to his father and in-laws for Christmas, the latter of which ends in a surreal reunion with his former bandmates. Throughout the novel, Lester desperately pines to return to Chicago, land of his youth, with his actions and those of the people around him dragging him further and further away from his goal. I won't spoil the second half of the book, only to say that Lester's dreams come true... in a twisted, Monkey's Paw fashion. And even in this, Lester is completely impotent, his life dictated by everyone else around him.

That, if anything, is the defining theme of NVSQVAM: the lingering unease that Generation X has with American culture and themselves. Sterzinger's writing is shot through with GenX tropes: punk rock, David Letterman, Nirvana, and anti-consumerism among them. Lester constantly finds himself in conflict with everyone younger or older than him, whether it's his overly serious, domineering father or his ditzy pseudo-hipster paramour Cyndi. Sterzinger's writing reminds me of a secular, more stridently anti-natalist version of her friend Andy Nowicki; indeed, Nowicki once characterized Sterzinger's canon as "anti-life fiction." And despite this religious gap, Nowicki's and Sterzinger's work is more similar than different; both feature self-immolating loser protagonists who spiral into mental illness in response to the world rejecting them.

Generation X was both with one foot in the old world and one in the new. They were eyewitnesses to the final collapse of the traditionalist West and its usurpation by cultural Marxism; anti-white multiculturalism, feminism and consumerism. Pretty much every work of literature or art that came from GenX is defined by this discomfort and alienation from the world, whether it's the existential nausea of Kurt Cobain or the rudderless hedonism of Mark Ames.

As a Millennial, I'm never going to be able to understand this alienation in anything more than an abstract sense. Millennials are alienated, that much is obvious, but the particular kind of alienation in Heart Killer and NVSQVAM (Nowhere) is GenX's alone. It's a generational gap that will never be traversed.

Nonetheless, I can gaze into the abyss of GenX with riveting, hilarious novels like NVSQVAM (Nowhere). As a comic yet poignant expression of an entire generation's angst, NVSQVAM is top-notch and an absolute necessity for your collection.

Five stars for the quality of writing and the storytelling. Reader beware - this is a depressing story. It is about an unhappy family man who is facing success in his career, but seems to find any reason to fail. Some reviewers say it is a story about mid-life regrets, but the series of failures are mostly self-inflicted. So I'd say this is a story about bad choices made on purpose.