Insane in the memoir-brane

Author explains how his first novel literally drove him crazy in Nervous System

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Jan Lars Jensen’s Nervous System or, Losing My Mind in Literature is a memoir written by a sane man who recalls, with startling clarity, what it felt like to be a crazy person. Jensen wasn’t always nuts; back in 1998, he was a happily married man with a steady (if low-paying) job at a small library in Fraser Valley. What’s more, his dreams of becoming a published author had finally been realized—his novel Shiva 3000 had just been purchased by a prestigious American publisher and was set to arrive in bookstores the following summer.

That’s when everything started to unravel for him, though. Shiva 3000, you see, was a futuristic fantasy inspired by Hindu mythology, with Hindu gods and goddesses serving as some of Jensen’s characters. And as the date of publication approached, Jensen became more and more terrified about the possibility that his novel would spark a huge controversy in the Hindu world. After a certain point, Jensen’s fears became completely irrational—he didn’t just imagine himself the victim of some kind of Salman Rushdie-style death decree; he literally became convinced that his book would touch off an international incident that would eventually lead to nuclear warfare and the end of human life on this planet as we know it. It takes a while for Jensen’s friends and colleagues to figure out that he’s completely flipped—his publisher attributes Jensen’s peculiar behaviour to the jitters of a first-time author, and it’s only after an unsuccessful suicide attempt that his perplexed wife finally realizes that her husband needs to go to a mental hospital.

That’s where Nervous System begins, and the first section of the book is the most compelling part of Jensen’s story. What’s so fascinating about Jensen’s account of his madness is the utterly calm, matter-of-fact way in which he explains everything he did. In his mind, everything he did had a completely rational explanation: in one memorable sequence, for instance, he explains that the reason he spent the night sleeping on the floor in a pool of moonlight by the window was because he knew that there were gunmen looking for him outside the building, and so to make sure they didn’t shoot any innocent people, he decided to give them a clear shot at him. To the outside world, he looked crazy; inside his mind, he was bravely risking his life to save the other patients.

There’s certainly a messianic streak to Jensen’s delusions, but isn’t an inability to put your own fears and neuroses in the proper perspective one of the definitions of insanity? Jensen brings a droll sense of humour to this aspect of his story—the grim joke that he truly believed the world was about to end because of his book, which hardly anybody even bothered to buy. (Forget about the Hindus; even the reviewers were largely indifferent to it.) There’s a frightening yet undeniably comical scene where Jensen sends his wife an e-mail containing instructions for containing the damage he believes his novel will cause—only to worry that the people of the future would see him as the Devil and do precisely the opposite of what he wants them to. “I didn’t dare delete the e-mail,” he writes. “I decided the most honest option was to state my lack of certainty in a second e-mail.... But maybe this would cause a rift between two rival camps that arose in the new civilization, each side disputing the validity of the other’s sacred e-mail, and a horrible conflict would arise out of that, too! I didn’t know!”

Now, I don’t want to cause a similarly apocalyptic conflict between rival book reviewers, but I feel I have to address the bizarre pan of Nervous System in last week’s issue of SEE Magazine by Dana McNairn, whose hostile attitude toward Jensen’s description of his recovery from mental illness can only be described as Scientological in its fury. (McNairn seems outraged by the very notion that Jensen credits the drug Xanax with correcting the chemical imbalance that sent him off his rocker—as if a real man should have been able simply to will himself sane again.)

McNairn regards the book as nothing but an ego trip, a ploy from a desperate writer to get back in print after the commercial failure of his debut novel. But I don’t see anything calculated or self-aggrandizing about this book at all—when a writer undergoes a fascinating, dramatic, emotional experience like the one Jensen did, isn’t it natural for him to want to write about it? And isn’t it lucky that Jensen was able to capture the whole ludicrous, scary story as lucidly and honestly has he has here? And who cares if Shiva 3000 didn’t sell well? Most midlist literary novels don’t! Is that any reason to question Jensen’s motives for writing his second book?

Call me crazy, but I think Nervous System is a terrific, compelling memoir that brought me as close to mental illness as I ever hope to get. V

Nervous System or, Losing My Mind in Literature
By Jan Lars Jensen • Raincoast Books • 273 pp. • $34.95

Insane in the memoir-brane

Author explains how his first novel literally drove him crazy in Nervous System

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