Charles Demers, The Prescription Errors

When Vancouver’s Charles Demers started writing fiction in 2005, the first thing he committed to paper was a bit of oddball black comedy: a scene in which a guy accidentally shows a Stanley Kubrick movie to a kid he’s babysitting, with predictably ghastly results.

At first, Demers — who has made a name for himself on the West Coast as a comedian, activist, and, more recently, a TV host — parlayed the idea into a stand-up joke. “[The kid] wanted Singin’ in the Rain,” he says, self-paraphrasing, “but I got A Clockwork Orange, because at least it’s the same song.”

But as he kept accumulating ideas, Demers decided he wanted to revisit that initial idea on the page. More than that, he realized that a bunch of his imagined protagonists seemed like the same guy. The babysitter who misguidedly rents Kubrick films started, in Demers’ head, to blend with the obsessive-compulsive who studies reports about medical equipment in the hopes of coming to terms with the childhood trauma of watching his mother slowly die from leukemia.

Once unified, Demers’ narrative quickly ballooned from a short story to a novella to, finally, a novel. That novel has now been published by Toronto’s Insomniac Press as The Prescription Errors, a story of family and mental health, and both the Clockwork Orange and OCD strains appear in the life of the bumbling but heroically earnest Daniel. There’s also a smaller parallel story involving a hack comedian/voice actor who lands an uncomfortable gig on a Simpsons-esque cartoon down in Los Angeles.

On the surface, these two men would appear to have nothing in common, but Demers sees a kinship that runs deeper, almost subterranean. “At core they’re two selfish, self-obsessed guys who have to deal with other people around them crumbling,” he says. “You definitely have a bit more sympathy for Daniel than for Ty. Maybe by the end, you realize that some of your criticisms of Ty could also rightly be leveled at Daniel; in the end, some of your sympathy for Daniel is also appropriate for Ty.”

Of course, with a first novel comes the assumption that the author has in fact written a thinly veiled autobiography. This isn’t helped in Demers’ case by the fact that he drew heavily from his own emotionally fraught life, as well as from the pieces and neighbourhoods of Vancouver he knows best. Still, he maintains a firm distance from his hero.

“[Daniel] is not me,” he says. “He’s had a completely different set of experiences from me. I never had a Trotskyist landlord. [Pause.] That’s pretty much the only thing I haven’t had. [Laughs.] I’m being facetious, but… oh yeah, and I didn’t go to Langara. Those are the two things.”

As for the real, still-tender material he did bring to the page, Demers says the experience has ultimately been rewarding, though perhaps not in the way he’d hoped. “I guess I had thought there’d be some kind of catharsis in writing about a lot of this stuff,” he says, “but like an amoeba, it sort of broke off and became its own story, unrelated to mine.

“A couple of the passages I wrote while I was crying, and I certainly wasn’t crying when I edited them, or when I read them today. They’ve become completely fictionalized.”

Insomniac Press, 224 pp., $19.95, paperback

(interview originally appeared in SEE Magazine, November 19, 2009)

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

The seeds for the grandiose new novel by Istanbul’s Orhan Pamuk were covertly planted midway through Snow, his metafictional murder mystery translated into English in 2004. In that earlier novel, the narrator (who is also a writer called Orhan Pamuk) walks into a room piled high with everyday objects that his friend Ka used before his death. The sight prompts the narrator to remember that he “had told him [Ka] about The Museum of Innocence, an idea I was still keeping from everyone”.

Several years later, Pamuk’s playful hint has indeed become a fully realized novel, his first since he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. But where Snow was exhilarating in its chilly ingenuity, full of riddles and in-text puzzles, The Museum of Innocence draws its strength from old-fashioned love and loss. And like its source material, the book is sprawling, beautiful, frantic, and, in the end, painfully honest.

Passions guide the way from the opening pages, when a Turkish businessman named Kemal begins a blissful affair with Füsun, a bewitching young shopgirl, right under the nose of his fiancée. Things come to an inevitably messy head, forcing Kemal to spend year after torturous year—Pamuk seeming to relish how slowly he makes time move, fully immersing the reader in his hero’s restlessness—trying to win back his mistress’s hand, this time legitimately.

Along the way, the only things that console Kemal are the multitudes of small objects he squirrels away that bear some connection to Füsun: from figurines she once picked up and admired to 4,213 of her cigarette butts, carefully annotated by date. Throughout, Kemal addresses readers as if they were guests at his imagined museum.

The exhibits, such as they are, speak to both the curator’s unflappable devotion and his near-obsessive streak. At one point he cheerily introduces “Füsun’s white panties with her childish white socks and her dirty white sneakers, without comment, to evoke our spells of sad silence”.

With its constant staggering between dejection and nirvana, the book can be an exercise in endurance; after you finish, the prospect of re-reading it seems daunting at best. But the ever-crafty Pamuk manages to leave an artful imprint of his hero, kleptomania and all, on your psyche all the same.

Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Knopf Canada, 536 pp, $34.95, hardcover

(review originally appeared in The Georgia Straight, November 12, 2009)

John Ortved, The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

There’s a juicy sentence tucked away near the end of John Ortved’s preface to The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, one that neatly describes the new book’s appeal for fans of the canonical, endlessly quoted, longest-running sitcom in TV history. In explaining why he structures his book as an oral history, compiled from both original interviews and excerpts from old ones, Ortved says that his approach is all the more logical because of “the lack of cooperation from Jim Brooks and the current Simpsons staff.”

The subtext in this line is clear: if you want to find the dirt they—ie. executive producer Brooks, creator Matt Groening, and the voices of the Simpsons themselves—don’t want you to know, you’ve come to the right place.

I’m not sure how well Ortved, a 29-year-old former Vanity Fair staffer, is able to follow through on this delicious subliminal promise, but his Uncensored, Unauthorized History is nonetheless a well-told patchwork that, despite the occasional lapse into editorializing, shines formidable light on the show that over the past 20 years has earned its parent network $3 billion in revenue, a Peabody Award, a star on the Walk of Fame, and 23 Emmys (though, curiously, never one for Outstanding Comedy Series).

The story begins when Groening, then a syndicated underground cartoonist, comes to the attention of mega-writer/producer Brooks, who commissions a series of 30-second interstitials to run as part of The Tracey Ullman Show. Before long these quirky clips overshadowed the rest of the show, which is when the then-fledgling Fox Network took a risk the established networks wouldn’t: they put an expensive, adult-oriented cartoon in prime time.

Cue Bartmania. Cue in-fighting and “creative differences.” Cue a new benchmark for modern comedy.

As Ortved’s numerous citations make clear, a lot of this information is not new, and as a result it’s possible that bigger fans than myself (I put myself somewhere around the 65th percentile) may already know this trajectory, as well as the bulk of the underscoring anecdotes. But if nothing else, the oral history format allows for the timeline to really breathe, and presents shared experiences from multiple—and frequently conflicting—angles.

Consider the ongoing question of whether Groening deserves as much credit (and money) as he continues to receive for the show’s success. The general consensus in the book is no, but while many of the early staffers admit that Groening was a creative visionary and a more-than-affable boss, a particularly disgruntled assistant to executive producer Sam Simon claims to have despised the show’s creator so much she came up with a nickname for him: “Fat Fuck Groening.”

Ortved also devotes a substantial number of pages to the legendary writers’ room, where, for the first few seasons, a bunch of the funniest people in America sat around a table and cranked out dozens of classic scripts, one after another. These writers included current Late Night host Conan O’Brien—whom Ortved does interview firsthand—as well as George Meyer and John Swartzwelder, two senior writers who take on near-mythic status in the eyes of their peers and successors. For comedy nerds, these chapters are the real payoff.

Speaking of O’Brien, it’s worth noting who else Ortved was able to convince to talk to him, given that the core of the current staff would not. He gets Hank Azaria, voice of Apu, Moe, Chief Wiggum, and dozens of other essential characters. He gets Ricky Gervais, and Pixar’s Brad Bird. He gets South Park’s Matt Stone, and Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane. He gets Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch. Combined with numerous academics as well as writers and staffers from throughout the show’s history, it’s an impressively diverse cross-section.

Still, the book is not without flaws. Questions of censorship aside, the absence of fresh quotes from Groening and Brooks undoubtedly leaves a gap in the story. And Ortved’s between-quote narration has a bad habit of parachuting in the author’s opinions—particularly about the subjective world of comedy itself—without justification of any kind.

My biggest problem, though, is that it seems a little premature to attempt such a broad, all-encompassing retrospective. The Simpsons is still on the air, after all, and will remain that way until at least 2011. At the same time, many of the people Ortved interviews already speak of the show in the past tense—its glory days now nearly a decade behind it, and yet it keeps chugging along, slowly but surely, into irrelevance.

There’s a tone of objective hindsight, in other words, but neither the perspective nor insight to match it. Had Ortved waited until the show is actually taken off the air, he might have compiled the definitive history of one of the most important shows in television history. He might have even gotten James Brooks to contribute a quote or two.

Greystone Books, 332 pp, $34.95, hardcover

(review originally appeared in SEE Magazine, November 12, 2009)

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

In his first novel, 1995’s High Fidelity, British author Nick Hornby gave heroic voice to audiophiles and culture snobs everywhere, showing life and love as a series of top-five lists and all big questions therein revolving around which is the best Velvet Underground record.

Now, with his sixth and latest, Juliet, Naked, Hornby revisits the spiky terrain of pop music and the obsessives who consume it, but his tone is calmer, more assured, and ultimately more nourishing. Now, when a wide-eyed fan tells his favourite musician that the man’s work changed his life, Hornby gives the musician a welcome dollop of big-picture rationality. “Great,” he responds. “I mean, great if your life needed changing, that is. Maybe it didn’t.”

The musician in question is Tucker Crowe, a reclusive American singer-songwriter who suddenly vanished from the public eye after releasing a critically acclaimed breakup album called Juliet in the mid-1980s. Content to let his legacy slowly fizzle out, Tucker’s public persona and music are unwillingly resurrected in the Internet age by a tiny niche of “Crowologists”: middle-aged men who gather around an on-line message board to obsess over every scrap of Tucker’s biography and parse every lyric to within an inch of its life. At the forefront of their ranks is Duncan, a plain college teacher from small-town England, who has slowly brought his long-time girlfriend, Annie, into sharing his enthusiasm—an enthusiasm that turns to outright fanaticism when Duncan learns Crowe is breaking 20 years of silence to release an album of demos from the Juliet sessions, titled Juliet, Naked.

Alternating between Annie’s and Tucker’s perspectives, the novel takes a step back from the mentality of the superfan while still digging into the juicy questions of what art means to its audience. Are rough drafts more “authentic” than the end results? Can art transcend the autobiographical details that inspired it? And—in a clear echo of High Fidelity—can we really learn anything about a person from the culture they love?

It’s a testament to Hornby’s achievement in this quick, funny, thoroughly likable novel that these questions appear so fully formed, and are given such thoughtful consideration besides.

Riverhead, 406 pp, $32.50, hardcover

(review originally appeared in The Georgia Straight, October 29, 2009)

Lorrie Moore, A Gate At The Stairs

While chiefly heralded for her prowess as a writer of short fiction, the Wisconsin-based Lorrie Moore has in fact spent her career alternating between novels and story collections. Her newest novel, A Gate at the Stairs—which is also her first book in more than a decade—brings the count even once again: three to three. Sadly, it doesn’t hit nearly as many high notes as Moore’s devout fan base has come to expect.

It’s fall 2001, and 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, recently uprooted from the farmland of her youth to the nearby university town of Troy, needs a job. She’s inexplicably drawn to the childcare section on employment corkboards, and before long lands a gig baby-sitting for a pleasant but muted couple who are about to adopt. Racial politics then explode into the picture when the toddler, who is visibly one-quarter black, becomes a lightning rod for the midwestern town’s ugly prejudices. The general frenzy of post–9/11 life only adds to the tension.

When plunked alongside Troy’s chattering middle class, which is where the novel spends roughly half its time, Tassie’s story works. Her murky relationship to the adoptive parents is nicely teased out, and, as ever, Moore is a master at writing about children. Wide-eyed Mary-Emma is the book’s crown jewel. These urban sections also contain glimpses of Moore’s trademark wit and descriptive panache. A fortune cookie is “a short paper nerve baked in an ear”; a coffee shop located near the law school is called On What Grounds.

But—and it is immensely strange to be saying this about a writer of Moore’s calibre—there are also big stretches of heel-dragging inactivity, particularly whenever Tassie returns home to her parents’ farm between semesters. Chores are performed and subplots are piled up, yet for the most part narrative tension is nowhere to be found.

In her best work, Moore is able to condense decades of emotional turmoil into a few dozen tightly wound pages. This is the very syrup of life: thick, exquisite, and almost unbearably rich. A Gate at the Stairs attempts to turn some of that syrup into a full glass of juice, but the result is too watery, and at times nearly transparent.

Bond Street Books, 322 pp, $29.95, hardcover

(review originally appeared in The Georgia Straight, October 22, 2009)

Billeh Nickerson, McPoems

When he was in his last year of high school, Billeh Nickerson got a job — his first — working the grill at a McDonald’s in Langley, B.C. Despite the fact that he’d unknowingly picked the second-busiest location in all of Western Canada, which got so hectic that sometimes one person’s job was simply handing out bags of food at the drive-thru for hours at a time, Nickerson remained optimistic.

“It was my first adult thing, right? It was all still very new. So I was excited,” he says over the phone from Toronto. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m being exploited. I should make more. I’m working too hard’ — I think I was making $3.65 an hour. My God! It was a nightmare!”

Nickerson revisits this most unusual and formative time in his life, 20 years after the fact, in his new poetry collection, the incisive and very funny McPoems. While he started writing and performing poetry at about this age, Nickerson says it never occurred to him to write about his job, because it was so mundane. Looking back, however, he sees that it’s sometimes the most ordinary, everyday details that are most worth documenting.

And in a cultural climate like today’s, where workplace sitcoms like The Office draw audiences by the millions, Nickerson’s behind-the-scenes look at fast food feels particularly in tune with the zeitgeist. “[McDonald’s was] one of those places where you have kids who are rich, but their parents wanted them to have that [work] experience,” he remembers. “You have people who’ve worked there for 30, 40 years. You have retirees. It was such a hodgepodge of people, and it helped me realize the realities that are out there for people — whether that’s your co-workers or the people that are coming in.”

McPoems provides a wide-reaching catalogue of both of these groups: from the narrator’s hapless co-workers (“The only thing harder / than being named Madonna / is being named Madonna / and having to wear a name tag”) to the peanut gallery of regular customers, including an elderly woman who obsessively spells out the word G-L-O-R-I-A in French fries and the man who affixes ice cream cones to his forehead and stomps around the restaurant until they melt and fall off. (His nickname? The Unicorn.)

Nickerson’s poems are extremely short, often only a few lines long, and feature almost nothing but matter-of-fact descriptions, yet they still manage to convey warmth and skull-crushing boredom in equal but alternating doses. They are the field notes of an average teenage employee, hastily scribbled on napkins during a coffee break so the ridiculousness of it all won’t be forgotten.

They’re also frequently funny, in a Sisyphean way — my favourite of the bunch is “Daylight Savings Diptych,” which details the various ways you will be yelled at when the end-of-breakfast/beginning-of- lunch cut-off time moves in either direction. As with these kinds of jobs in general, it’s a no-win situation.

For legal reasons, Nickerson can’t specifically name the target company or any of its trademarked products in the book, though references to green holiday milkshakes and big purple mascots — not to mention the title — leave little to the imagination. And he says the collection is only loosely inspired by his 18 months spent at the Golden Arches. It’s more about fast food culture as a general concept: the way these identical-looking stores pop up all over the planet, and the way we as customers internalize their obsession with speed and disposability.

The end result feels suitably authentic and lived-in, but then again, these are ideas that Nickerson’s been living with, for better or for worse, even after hanging up his apron all those years ago.

“It’s been 20 years, and I still have cheeseburger nightmares,” he says. “I wake up, and I’ve been making cheeseburgers on the grill — they do them in groups of 12, and it’s mustard, mustard, mustard, mustard, mustard, mustard. Ketchup, ketchup, ketchup, ketchup, ketchup, ketchup.”

Arsenal Pulp Press, 80 pp, $15.95, paperback

(interview originally appeared in SEE Magazine, October 1, 2009)

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

Early in Inherent Vice, the new hippie-detective yarn by American novelist Thomas Pynchon, a perpetually stoned PI named Doc Sportello recoils at the growing complexities surrounding his case. At this point, barely 50 pages in, Doc has it pegged as a kidnapping that somehow involves Doc’s ex-girlfriend, a shady real-estate developer, various acquaintances, Nazi bodyguards, and a grudge-holding LAPD officer/TV actor named Bigfoot Bjornsen. Doc shakes his head at the possibilities: “Too much to think about.”

It’s a feeling any Pynchon reader can relate to, though by the author’s own labyrinthine standards Doc’s is actually a rather manageable story. Set in 1970 in the fictionalized Californian town of Gordita Beach—allegedly a stand-in for Manhattan Beach, where the reclusive Pynchon is said to have lived at that time—the novel is a hedonistic rush, with equal parts sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, B movies, and greasy food.

Perhaps because he’s tethered himself to a single genre, Pynchon keeps a relatively short leash on his hyperactive imagination, even when recounting Doc’s various acid trips or detailing the history of a mysterious entity called the Golden Fang—which is a smuggling boat, or a New Age rehab clinic, or a tax dodge invented by dentists, or all or none of the above. As Doc’s case spirals outward, his moment-to-moment actions make a certain loopy kind of sense, even if the big picture often remains as frayed as his white Afro.

Much of Pynchon’s recent work has drawn criticism for overindulging in pop-culture references and outright silliness, and those who agree with this assessment will probably find much to dislike about the new novel, too. Reproduced lyric sheets to several made-up surf songs, such as “Soul Gidget” and “Just the Lasagna (Semi-Bossa Nova)” (the latter’s opening lines being “Izzit some U, FO? (No, no-no!) Maybe it’s—wait, I know!”), seem particularly ripe targets for scorn.

But Inherent Vice, with its gumshoe hero and general air of pot-induced paranoia, may be better equipped to stand on its own. After all, what is every splinter of cultural driftwood that meanders onto the page but another potential clue? What is a pizza topped with pork rinds and boysenberry yogurt but a Rosetta Stone waiting to be discovered?

Penguin, 384 pp, $35, hardcover

(review originally appeared in The Georgia Straight, October 1, 2009)