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59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Epic@qwest tale, March 22, 2004
This review is from: WILL@epicqwest.com: A Medicated Memoir (Paperback)
"Quirky" and "edgy" are hard things to write. And in Tom Grimes's funny, smart novel "WILL@epicqwest.com," the edgy and smart are very much present. Only here, they're mixed with chemically-augmented satire -- an intoxicating mix. Will is the 21st-century lost-long twin of Holden Caulfield: a depressed loser college student with a weird family, who also has enough medication in his body to open his own pharmacy. He's wrapped up in his own bizarre thoughts and lets schoolwork go to the wayside. Oh yes -- he has a quest to go on (get it? epicqwest.com?). I.S. (Information Sickness) is "a virus that makes people think, and occasionally laugh, too much," and kills them when it overloads their minds. Our anti-hero is out to stop the malevolent Dr. Bones and his sexy henchwoman, and save everyone from overload and imminent death. To save humankind (or something like that, Will joins forces with his talkative computer Spunk to stop Dr. Bones before it's too late. "Wacky" is not usually a good word to associate with a satirical novel. But "WILL@epicqwest.com" has a certain sense of wackiness that keeps it from being heavy-handed. Grimes takes pokes at postmodern civilization: at sex, philosophy, computers, love, parents, capitalism, learning and drugs to keep us happy -- and it's all through the jaded eyes of a heavily medicated college student. It's either hysterically funny, or insanely scary. Most cool genre-bending authors trip over their own efforts to be edgy and cool. Grimes doesn't. While peppering the story with pop culture references, he excels in his writing -- at some times it seems like a straighforward first-person story. At other times, all those drugs in Will's system twist his viewpoint a little bit. The dialogue is amazing, especially during scenes where the characters are having major "moments" ("I loved you even before I saw you airbrushed onto a haystack"). Even the chapter titles are called things like "Part Two, Chapter Two: In Which I Sate the Reader's Need for Narrative Drive, or Suffer the Wrath of the Marketplace." Anti-hero Will is a witty, strange protagonist with unusual priorities. It's hard to summarize a guy whose brain takes up an entire book, and seems to spill over the edges. He's weird, and it works. And Spunk, the Pancho to Will's Don Quixote, is what makes the quest a winner, with his constant opinions and input. (Think C3-PO, but much less subserviant) Sardonic and edgy, this is a must-read (especially for cynical students). Tom Grimes' wry fourth novel "WILL@epicqwest.com" is a hyperactive satire with a manic edge. Better than Prozac.
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57 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Virtual Truth in the age of Virtual Happiness, January 15, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: WILL@epicqwest.com: A Medicated Memoir (Paperback)
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?
WILL@epicqwest.com 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.
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72 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Laugh out loud funny with slyly serious intent, June 4, 2003
This review is from: WILL@epicqwest.com: A Medicated Memoir (Paperback)
Although I think it is a little over the top to compare this "novel" (actually it reads more like an unformated script for the next Mike Meyers flick) to "a daring cross between Voltaire's Candide and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove" as the cover blurb does, I do think Tom Grimes is one very funny dude. What this "epic quest" really reminds me of is Don Quixote de la Mancha as updated by Saturday Night Live. Will, the "anti-hero" of this "medicated memoir" is a freshman at a "by the side of the Interstate" college near a polluted bay whose psychopharmacologist(s) have him on Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, etc. so that he might cope with the vicissitudes of postmodern life. Peering through the haze he discovers a new viral infection set loose on the world by "the evil Dr. Bones," a disease he calls "Information Sickness." Too much meaningless information apparently kills, and so Will begins a Quixotic quest to save humanity from information overload. Along the way he has kinky and funny carnal knowledge of two babes and what might be called wet noodle knowledge of a third, respectively, Crystal Goodlay (body-beautiful assistant to the evil Dr. B.), ABD Chandra (belly dancer and Indian chef extraordinaire), and Naomi (fellow virology student and luscious centerfold spread). So much for the plot premise, which doesn't matter. What Tom Grimes is really up to here is a mass satirical attack on all things postmodern, corporate, governmental, intellectual, collegiate, therapeutic, literary, sexual, informational, and a whole lot more. The really insidious thing about Grimes is that not only is he belly-laugh funny, he is well-read. The allusions and references to things scientific and literary actually wage war with allusions and references to the pop culture in this twisted tale of all things overloaded. Grimes is conversant with complexity theory, modern philosophy, stock market dynamics, information theory, cosmology, as well as testosterone and cyberspace. In reading something that would appeal to, say, the viewers of American Pie, one can simultaneously smirk with satisfaction at knowing the intelligentsia-droppings scattered throughout. This is no dumbed-down cartoon network pseudo-novel--well, it's a pseudo-novel, but one with Film Potential. What Grimes should be doing with his talent for wordsmithing and laugh out loud satirical thrusts is writing teen exploitation scripts for Tristar or HBO while moonlighting for Saturday Night Live. Come to think of it, he probably is.
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