Healthy tale of technology sickness
By Anne Morris
Special to the Express-News
WILL@epicqwest.com (a medicated memoir)
By Tom Grimes
Ludlow Press, $12.95
A cliché of the Internet Age is that we have too much information but not enough truth.
Author Tom Grimes calls the condition Information Sickness and sends his youthful narrator, Will, on a crazy quest to find the cure for this virus that technology created. The name of the novel: "WILL@epicqwest.com."
Will attends the Campus-by-the-Interstate, which shares a location with Southwest Texas State University, where Grimes directs the graduate creative writing program. He wrote the 184-page novel, which will be released Tuesday, over the last few years, in between other projects.
"I really didn't want to be lost as a bureaucrat and an administrator, so I carved out time to write," Grimes says.
Surrounded every day by students and a university, he chose that setting, then made it darkly funny. In the novel, the school occupies the buildings of an abandoned outlet mall; the library is bookless; the jewel of the university is its International Volleyball Institute. Will's story, posted on his Web site, takes the reader through a series of wild adventures — some drug-induced. It's often hard to tell the real from the imagined, but in a book that speeds along like this one, that matters little.
Grimes subscribes to the view that whatever we can long for, or imagine, is real. Anything else is "a stingy view of reality." Will's dismal grade-point average does not reflect the weighty questions he asks. Can true love exist in a world of mood drugs and information, information, information? How are you supposed to feel while sitting on a couch eating frozen chocolate crunch yogurt and watching ethnic cleansing footage on TV? Why does life sometimes feel so empty? How do you find the faith to go on living?
Grimes, 48, admits "Will" is autobiographical. Like Will, Grimes has problems with the consumer-driven, information-laden world. He saw plenty of it in the 1980s as a businessman in New York City's Soho, managing a high-end housewares company frequented by Martha Stewart. Insights from that time inform his fiction. The character of Will also recalls a bright but disaffected student Grimes once had in freshman comp.
"He was kind of at a loss — very curious and smart, with deep questions, but essentially directionless."
The clueless Will embarks on his quest, a mission to save the world. The structure is that of "The Odyssey," "Candide" or "Don Quixote," but seriously updated. Instead of someone like Sancho Panza, Will's faithful sidekick is a laptop computer named Spunk, given to smart-aleck remarks that keep the quester focused on his goals when he seems likely to dally too long with one of the centerfolds or supermodels that appear in odd places.
Grimes aimed the novel at the 18-to-34-year-old age group and insisted it be published as a paperback original, to make it affordable.
"I've been around students a lot, and I know how tight money is for them," he says.
Still, the jokes and literary allusions seem likely to help it reach a broader market. Blessed with eerie timing that puts the spotlight on Information Sicknesss at a time when the SARS virus threatens the world, Grimes' taut little novel is in tune with what's happening now.
"There are even fighter jets flying over the university, the way they are in the book," he says.
He just wishes he had put in something about the revival of the new "thought police" reminiscent of McCarthyism.
"There's a hypocrisy of liberating Iraq while censoring speech at home," he says.
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Anne Morris is a writer in Austin.
05/18/2003
