Will Epicqwest.com Book

¶ … Satire: Grimes, Tom. Medicated Memoir. New York: Ludlow Press, 2003. The book A Medicated Memoir is indeed a book, not as its title is deceptively designed to suggest, a domain name upon the World Wide Web. However, the deceitful nature of the book's title is emblematic of the text's satirical style, penned by its author Tom Grimes. The web, some of its most ardent zealots might suggest, seems infinite in its nature as once the human will was in its epic quest for real truth.

However, rather than ultimately being expanded by bandwidth, human beings instead find themselves only, ultimately, limited by its illusions of breadth and depth. The novel satirizes the false nature of the modern search for information and truth through medicine and technology, given a particular stress upon the falsity of education and drugs in the modern world.

The novel's hero Will is a college student on a heroic quest to who is a kind of modern-day Ulysses who is attempting to uncover the truth behind a new virus that is attempting to wipe-out all of humanity. He is going to school at a university located on a toxic waste dump that parallels the nature of learning at the institution.

The name of the virus Will is pursuing is called IS, or 'Information Sickness,' implying that modern humanity is suffering from a glut of information that, in the words of the virus' creator Dr. Bones, makes human beings laugh and know too much, glutting them on facts without any real basis in knowledge.

The fact that the evil IS a virus creates yet another parallel with the virtual world, as viruses are able to, with increasing frequency, bring hard drives to a standstill as they force the system to become glutted with information, forced eternally to replicate particular operation. Will himself, however, is not immune to the excesses of the world and the age in which he dwells. Will himself is medicated, on multiple kinds of drug in his own search for happiness, enough, the narrative tells us, to begin his own pharmacy.

As the virus he pursues threatens to over saturate humanity with a glut of information, so does Will's own education. His room is filled with books and information to a point of over-saturation, to the point where he can ignore it, and faces instead the pursuit of the worm. The modern pharmaceutical industry as well as modern academic is satirized for it likewise gluts its 'users' with an over-influx of medication and stimulus.

Will's only true friend, it seems, is not his unsupportive and equally dysfunctional family but his computer, named Spunk. The fact that Will's computer is the hero's best friend seems unusually apt, as we live in a world where college students access not friends and family in real life, but where real life has an acronym (rf) and where computer-generated connections between human beings often seem more real than anything experienced in rf. The evil nemesis of Will in the book is Dr. Bones. But Dr.

Bones gives anything but the real nuts and bolts or bones of information. In fact, the nature of doctoring in this society in general is not medicinal, but is merely designed to pervert rather than sustain the ordinary functions of human existence. Dr. Bones, of course, has a henchwoman who is sexy and beautiful and tempts Will to abandon his quest in a siren like fashion.

However, although all of this satire may seem apt and instructive, given the shallowness of the modern era, one of the problems of satire is that frequently the characters who populate the world of the satire are so shallow, the reader is not include to sympathize with them, much less identify with them. Of course, if the book were a chronicle of the excesses of the modern clergy, this might be less of a problem.

But the purpose of Grimes in writing the book is to take aim at how superficial and shallow modern life is in the way it pursues knowledge through drugs and computers. By creating characters whom are equally hooked on drugs and computers in a shallow world with little emotional depth, rather than inspiring resonance with one's own life, the book has an emotionally flat and stale quality to its tone and to its plot and character development.

Grimes might assert that this is the 'point' of his book -- the characters are shallow because he wishes to highlight how addictions to information in academia and addictions to pharmaceuticals in the rest of the world make humanity shallow, to the point where a computer is the most interesting.