¶ … 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...
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…
