Last year about this time I sent a review on spec to the apparently now defunct Readerville Journal. Tom Grimes is a writer worth reading so I hope the following review will get readers interested, if they aren't already.
Review of WILL@epicqwest.com (a medicated memoir)
Feeling a little “whatever”? Prozac got you up? A little too aware of the post-modern absurdity of it all? Your diagnosis may be Information Sickness. And it could kill. Don’t panic (if such a strong emotion is still possible). Somebody out there is trying to save you. But your would-be hero, Will, might be infected and may not be able to save himself, much less you.
Worried?
WILL@epicqwest.com (a medicated memoir), Tom Grimes’ fourth novel might just stave off the potentially terminal infection. This dark comic satire may be the antidote for a culture that has lost touch with meaning. Typifying this culture is the novel’s hero, Will, undertaking a quixotic journey — dosed on Prozac and other medications — to discover the source of the “disease so insidious that its spread was relentless, detection nearly impossible, and the infection rate potentially universal,” and to restore meaning, co-opted and deconstructed by information to the point of extinction. So much information exists in contemporary society, according to the narrator, it kills meaning, and in the novel literally overloads brains and kills people.
From the beginning Will recognizes he’s lost faith in things, but has no reason — largely because he is “wildly medicated” — to understand this loss of faith. Until students at the University-on-the-Interstate start dying from Information Sickness. Then he begins his quest to eradicate the illness. But, as it turns out, Will is a victim of Information Sickness already. All of us may be infected, which seems Grimes’ point, a point made with relentless humor, almost as relentless as the sickness itself.
The novel plays postermodernly with a variety of literary devices, including a variation of the quixotic journey. Will is a postmodern Don Quixote, side-saddled with a postmodern Sancho Panza, his laptop computer, Spunky, programmed with enough artificial intelligence to be a font of information, but not necessarily wisdom. The computer cannot discern fact from fiction, or make meaning of its information, except perhaps when uncomfortably reminded of other artificially intelligent computers that get shut down by their users — Hal, for instance, in 2001, A Space Odyssey.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
very nice Todd, thanks and welcome!