[e-mail]: A Medicated Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Teenaged life philosophy in unconvincing (meta)fiction guise
Review: I don't know why I continued to read such typical, post(?)-post-modernist, subtly chauvenistic tripe to the end - I guess because it had looked mentally engaging and clever. Right. I suppose I got to a train-wreck stage where I couldn't with any ease pull myself away from the page. Luckily, it was short, and at least I have the feeling of satisfaction that I finished a book.

Basically, it was this dark, cynical teenager philosophy of life in an unconvincing guise of (meta)fiction. It seemed like it borrowed most of its plot devices straight from an Austin Powers movie. I give it a big 'W' for...what-ever!

I'll stick with David Foster Wallace if I want Pynchon-inspired fiction.

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Satire on the Culture of Misinformation
Review: I purchased this book online through the ads placed in the back of another Ludlow Press title, THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez. While that book is great, it's quite different from Tom Grimes' fantastic novel.

In [e-mail] we have a wholly unreliable narrator in Will. I'm reminded of the narrator of another book, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. Parts of the book seem to have a warped perspective as a result of over-medication, other parts appear to be quite straight-forward or simply fiction on the part of the author. (The novel is actually supposed to be the online journal of a "failed" college freshman -- so it's told from a first person perspective.)

The main storyline involves Will, the above mentioned, over-medicated college freshman loser, and his "quest" for meaning -- and his crusade against a mad scientist, Dr. Bones, who has created a new, deadly virus, which the media quickly labels IS (or "information sickness"). Will's sidekick is his laptop computer named "Spunk," and the laptop and Will engage in full conversations, much like the robots (like C3PO) do in STAR WARS. Will's "love interest" is Naomi, a centerfold pinup girl, and some of the most hilarious exchanges are between these two doomed love birds.

Like other satires (CANDIDE is mentioned in the back of the book), this is a book of ideas and much of what Grimes' is satirizing is our own insane consumer culture. Information Sickness is obviously a stab at the culture of misinformation, supported and promoted by the corporate media and exemplified by the so-called "information superhighway" of the internet, where any bit of hair-brained gossip poses as "information" or fact.

Will the protagonist slay the evil Dr. Bones? Will the protagonist find his Obi-wan mentor (aka, his long-lost dad)? Will the protagonist win the girl? Will his talking laptap computer talk him to death? These are just a few of the questions raised in the course of the narrative, which reads like a funhouse ride, full of unexpected surprises, pratfalls-- and goofy asides.

I must say that this novel is quite unlike any other I've read in years: hilarious, full of slapstick humor, all kinds of wacky misadventures. In the end, the reader is provoked to think: is THIS the kind of world I want to live in? Well, my answer to that is: only if I have a friend like the main protagonist, Will.

This novel is highly recommended. Way past cool.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Intoxicatingly Funny Novel since Catch-22
Review: If you love to laugh, then -- boy -- do I have a book for you! [e-mail] is quite simply one of the most hilarious novels (er, excuse me, "memoirs") I've read in a long time. The back cover mentions Candide and Dr. Stangelove, but the Marx Brothers and Monty Python's Flying Circus also come to mind. This is top-flight satire that's freewheeling and wild -- not to mention, incredibly smart. [e-mail] is written in the form of website entries (like an online diary); the website is of course the book's title (which, if you do a web search on [e-mail] is also an actual website). The "epic" adventures of the perennial screw-up/protagonist "Will" -- an "over-medicated" college freshman -- involves a hallucinatory "quest" to slay an evil scientist responsible for the creation of a deadly virus called IS ("Information Sickness"), a virus that kills anyone it comes in contact with via a kind of information overload...kind of like what one experiences on the "misinformation superhighway" of the internet (50 million websites and not a single straight answer to anything). Like a junior Don Quixote (perhaps no less self-deluded), hapless Will sets off with a sidekick, his self-aware, chatterbox laptop named "Spunk," who serves a guide and mentor one moment and foil and comic relief the next. Problem is: does the virus IS -- and the evil scientist -- even exist? Or is all this -- these extraordinary misadventures -- simply a side effect of the massive Prozac dosage our hero has been prescribed? Chapters open within chapters, like trapdoors, and the hero proceeds on his adventure often with the self-consciousness of a dreamer who is fully aware he is in a dream: nothing is real, while all seeming somehow hyper real. This self-awareness parodies post-post modern fiction or what's often called "meta-fiction:" but for me it's just unpredictably hilarious and zany. Truly this is one of best-informed, most witty novels I've read in a very long time. And the glowing praise for this book by authors like Tim O'Brien, Dennis Johnson, and Thom Jones -- as well as its underground reputation -- doesn't surprise me at all. A comic tour de force! Don't miss out!

Rating:
Summary: The Most Intoxicatingly Funny Novel since Catch-22
Review: If you love to laugh, then -- boy -- do I have a book for you! [e-mail] is quite simply one of the most hilarious novels (er, excuse me, "memoirs") I've read in a long time. The back cover mentions Candide and Dr. Stangelove, but the Marx Brothers and Monty Python's Flying Circus also come to mind. This is top-flight satire that's freewheeling and wild -- not to mention, incredibly smart. [e-mail] is written in the form of website entries (like an online diary); the website is of course the book's title (which, if you do a web search on [e-mail] is also an actual website). The "epic" adventures of the perennial screw-up/protagonist "Will" -- an "over-medicated" college freshman -- involves a hallucinatory "quest" to slay an evil scientist responsible for the creation of a deadly virus called IS ("Information Sickness"), a virus that kills anyone it comes in contact with via a kind of information overload...kind of like what one experiences on the "misinformation superhighway" of the internet (50 million websites and not a single straight answer to anything). Like a junior Don Quixote (perhaps no less self-deluded), hapless Will sets off with a sidekick, his self-aware, chatterbox laptop named "Spunk," who serves a guide and mentor one moment and foil and comic relief the next. Problem is: does the virus IS -- and the evil scientist -- even exist? Or is all this -- these extraordinary misadventures -- simply a side effect of the massive Prozac dosage our hero has been prescribed? Chapters open within chapters, like trapdoors, and the hero proceeds on his adventure often with the self-consciousness of a dreamer who is fully aware he is in a dream: nothing is real, while all seeming somehow hyper real. This self-awareness parodies post-post modern fiction or what's often called "meta-fiction:" but for me it's just unpredictably hilarious and zany. Truly this is one of best-informed, most witty novels I've read in a very long time. And the glowing praise for this book by authors like Tim O'Brien, Dennis Johnson, and Thom Jones -- as well as its underground reputation -- doesn't surprise me at all. A comic tour de force! Don't miss out!

Rating:
Summary: Virtual Truth in the age of Virtual Happiness
Review: In the titular character of this romp, Grimes has created a protagonist who can't decide whether to unify the polarizing forces within him or let them pull him apart.

Nineteen-year-old Will (as with so many who roam the Internet, no last name provided) is fantastical, yet all-too believable. He's entirely at the mercy of his own raging emotions and confused as to which to use productively and which to subdue with medication. He asks for purpose from a culture of cheap vanities and gross commodities. He is a student habitually absent from class. His family is archetypically dysfunctional - harpy for mother, jailbird for father - yet succoring. Will is, in short, an insightful post-adolescent who could either turn out to be a gag writer for Conan O'Brien or the next Noam Chomsky.

As the story (or "quest") begins, young Will has uncovered a plot by an evil scientist with an Elvis fixation, a supermodel girlfriend and tenure: Dr. Bones - to infect humankind with Information Sickness (IS) via ubiquitously distributed fat-free food substitutes. His sidekick in his adventure is his laptop, named "Spunk," whose various programming functions enable it to operate as everything from buddy to Greek chorus throughout. Will may know who is responsible for IS, but he does not know if a cure exists or can be developed in time. Supporting stock characters - trigger-happy yokels, beautiful but shallow coeds, sentimental slackers, political overachievers, academic narcissists, venture capitalists, intellectual property attorneys - jack-in-the-box out of other chapters but offer little help as Will tries to break out of his chemically induced state into choices that will restore himself and his world to balance.

Which is to say that, after all, there is a serious cast to the entertainment. IS not only leaves its victims with a sense of "trivialized omniscience" - knowing everything, but knowing, too, that "everything" has no significance - but it also kills. Grimes is addressing here the difficulty of the satirical enterprise. When life seems to have fulfilled the prophecies of such satires as John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, what's a humorist to do?

[e-mail] is a wild (and wildly literate) entertainment that works both as a satire of our product-obsessed culture and a coming-of-age story (set in our marketing-intensive, Prozac-popping age of pseudo-enlightenment). You'll want to dip into this book, again and again. Don't miss the opportunity to grab a copy!




Rating:
Summary: Virtual Truth in the age of Virtual Happiness
Review: In the titular character of this romp, Grimes has created a protagonist who can't decide whether to unify the polarizing forces within him or let them pull him apart.

Nineteen-year-old Will (as with so many who roam the Internet, no last name provided) is fantastical, yet all-too believable. He's entirely at the mercy of his own raging emotions and confused as to which to use productively and which to subdue with medication. He asks for purpose from a culture of cheap vanities and gross commodities. He is a student habitually absent from class. His family is archetypically dysfunctional - harpy for mother, jailbird for father - yet succoring. Will is, in short, an insightful post-adolescent who could either turn out to be a gag writer for Conan O'Brien or the next Noam Chomsky.

As the story (or "quest") begins, young Will has uncovered a plot by an evil scientist with an Elvis fixation, a supermodel girlfriend and tenure: Dr. Bones - to infect humankind with Information Sickness (IS) via ubiquitously distributed fat-free food substitutes. His sidekick in his adventure is his laptop, named "Spunk," whose various programming functions enable it to operate as everything from buddy to Greek chorus throughout. Will may know who is responsible for IS, but he does not know if a cure exists or can be developed in time. Supporting stock characters - trigger-happy yokels, beautiful but shallow coeds, sentimental slackers, political overachievers, academic narcissists, venture capitalists, intellectual property attorneys - jack-in-the-box out of other chapters but offer little help as Will tries to break out of his chemically induced state into choices that will restore himself and his world to balance.

Which is to say that, after all, there is a serious cast to the entertainment. IS not only leaves its victims with a sense of "trivialized omniscience" - knowing everything, but knowing, too, that "everything" has no significance - but it also kills. Grimes is addressing here the difficulty of the satirical enterprise. When life seems to have fulfilled the prophecies of such satires as John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, what's a humorist to do?

[e-mail] is a wild (and wildly literate) entertainment that works both as a satire of our product-obsessed culture and a coming-of-age story (set in our marketing-intensive, Prozac-popping age of pseudo-enlightenment). You'll want to dip into this book, again and again, laughing till you cry all the way.

Rating:
Summary: Witty and deadpan. A book about hope.
Review: In WILL we are introduced to a sardonic narrator, replete with a whole host of pharmaceutical baggage. Grimes takes us on a full blown ride into the manic brain of a young college student, struggling with consumerism, self-loathing, an indifferent happy-go-lucky father and an unobtainable love interest, not to mention a hilarious relationship with his sidekick, a laptop named Spunk. Look around at today's college age kids and you'll notice how many seem to prefer their laptop to the company of flesh and bone human friends. Only a writer who has dedicated his or her life to documenting such oblique social changes could have come up with the Spunk character. And it's precisely that gift, which Grimes' so deftly employs, that enables the reader to identify with WILL's strange, hyperactively modern soul- searching. It gives the book a unique appeal, producing a long-lasting literary effect no drug company could medicate away. As Samuel Beckett once wrote, "Nothing is more funny than unhappiness." In WILL, Grimes proves that point to the tee, taking an age old story about love and turning it into something new: a quest in the age of corporate information to find hope. A beauty of a book that reminds us what great fiction should be.

Rating:
Summary: I Loved it.
Review: Some novels depend rather more on characterization than do others. In the novel of ideas, the characters often exist as mouthpieces for various philosophical positions; while the writer may have taken the trouble to describe them and give them diverse individual attributes, they often have little real life outside of their specific argumentative role in the novel. Some people may have suggested this concerning Tom Grimes' latest novel posted here, but I disagree.

In many ways, [e-mail] is a novel of ideas, yes. But it is MORE than that. The level and efficiency of the writing and humor, which are quite sophisticated, provide a compelling drive to the book. Is it true that comedy creates its own energy? Yes. And that is certainly evident here. Because the book has a furious comic energy. This is truly a FUNNY book. And for no reason other than that would I recommend it. All that rest? Consider it all icing on the cake.

Pick up a copy of [e-mail] for a good belly laugh and I'll tell you this: You won't regret it. It's like the best of Terry Southern meets the best of Woody Allen meets the best of the Marx. Brothers. This book is a CLASSIC!

Along with this novel, I'd like to recommend Tom Grimes' other wonderful novels, City Of God and A Stone of the Heart -- on sale at Amazon. For more, check out -----------------> http://www.ludlowpress.com/will/tom_grimes.htm

Rating:
Summary: I just love a good epic quest comedy, don't you?
Review: The inside front cover and back cover of this book have comments which have tried and failed to convey the humor, wit and wisdom of the work. The writer is compared to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. The book is described as a cross between Voltaire's Candide and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Not exactly. In fact, there is no writer to whom anyone might accurately compare the style of Tom Grimes.

Nevertheless, I will give it my best shot, but I also will fail. I would have to say that the book reads similarly to what would obtain if Dave Barry were explaining at length to Honore de Balzac what in the hell the phrase "post-modernism" means in a purely erotic context. As in, and I quote:

"Authorities now suspect that having a sense of humor might make some victims susceptible to the virus [The author is seeking the cause of Information Sickness virus]. One popular culture professor and the author of the self published Just Kidding: Jokes, Rib-Ticklers and Bathroom Humor: Toward a Hermeneutics of Laughing; or, the Guffaw as Simulacral Paradigm in Laugh Track Culture, told staff reporters at the Prometheus, `Laughter is a trait of the fin de siecle periods. I mean you don't see people cracking jokes in the Iliad. Revolutionaries tend not to subscribe to the someday-this-will-all-seem-funny theory either; ask Robespierre.'"

Yes, the book has a plot, and subplots. The narrative is linear enough to be enjoyed as a tale. The character and his life are probably not quite like you and yours, but, oddly enough, there are plenty of similarities if you have ever taken a course in college and embarked on a quest (and who among us has not?). The campaign speech made by the candidate for President alone is worth the price of the book. Actually, it's a very funny book. Give it a try. If it doesn't make you laugh, you're grounded.

Rating:
Summary: Be Your Own Judge
Review: To those readers cautious of reading another cynical novel focusing on college life, check out the unusual campus of Grimes's novel: "The university [...] was built over a swamp that had been landfilled with garbage and toxic waste, then topped with asphalt. The admissions brochure denied reports of health hazards, calling them exaggerated.'" The hyperbolic landscape that Grimes takes us through is disturbingly close to my own memories of what college was like. "The financial aid package [...] promised 'successful applicants the best in education and entertainment.'"

Whether the target is a tenured faculty member with a ten-year grant to produce edible shrink wrap, or the "Girls-of-Campuses-Near-Interstates" pinup student, Grimes does not miss an opportunity. There are classes in "Advanced Volleyball" and "Existential Philosophy and the Hollywood Tradition." A student with a nature-writing major has a scholarship from an oil company. And the student body is subject to a fatal transmittable disease: Information Sickness.

Yes, there is an epidemic among the students, with too much information as the cause of death. Students now have a reason to not study for their midterms. Our hero, or anti-hero, or anti-anti-hero, is trying to track down the cause of this disease and put an end to it. On his quest he encounters spirits and guides, including a computer's help menu, an untenured faculty member with an office in the basement of the Disease Building, and Crystal Goodlay, secretary of the "evil " Dr. Bones, research scientist in the diet-foods arena.

Grimes's talent with humor is equaled with his talent as a writer, most evident in his skills with dialogue, which have earned him three Los Angeles Dramalogue Awards. Here is a conversation between Will, the medicated hero of the book, and Chandra, the untenured faculty member mentioned above - She asks:

"Tea?"
"We're going to smoke a joint?"
"You tell me. Is this a custom between American teachers and their students?"
"I don't know. I've gotten baked with my History of Rock 'N Roll teaching assistant, but never with a real professor."
"Oh, but I am...A.B.D. All But Dissertation..."
"Wow. I always thought that meant Approved By Disney"

At two hundred pages, and with the quick, skillfully executed prose of Grimes, the story has the feel of being told by a jokester quicker, wittier, and funnier than any you may have previously known.