Fiction Review

Amanda Tripp

The Prescription Errors
By Charles Demers
Toronto, ON: Insomniac Press, 2009
194 pp. $19.95

Set between Vancouver and Los Angeles, The Prescription Errors is a wry love letter to the Canadian city’s regional curiosities and cultural idiosyncrasies, in vivid contradistinction to its portrait of the traffic-jam-and-sunglasses culture of LA. Between the two cities, Charles Demers conjures a whirligig of class, race, sex and gender issues: his Vancouver is a social carnival on the brink of riot. Indeed much like his novel, Demers’ world teeters precariously between total chaos, and epiphany.

In what is only the first of many playful interactions between style and content, Demers likewise splits his novel between protagonists: though dominated by the obsessive-compulsive Daniel in Vancouver, the story periodically visits Ty, who is temporarily working in LA. While Daniel washes parkade floors across suburban Vancouver, Ty is filling in for a comatose voice-actor in LA, a gig that could make his fortune off the ill-luck of another. Daniel loses himself in medical research to sterilize his daily trauma, while Ty denies his insecurity in party-lines for the press. Ostensibly very different, the two men draw increasingly closer together without ever really crossing paths, geographically or metaphorically. Instead, Ty embodies anxiety traditionally associated with Daniel’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, persistently threatening to become an alternate personality or otherwise schizophrenic compartment of Daniel’s psychology.

The Prescription Errors doesn’t alleviate this threat to mental stability. In fact, Demers undermines a traditional notion of clarity at every step. But Ty is more than a doppelganger looming over the protagonist’s psychological security. Indeed, we might wish Demers had spent more time on Ty, whose personal progression seems unjustly stunted: even by the end of the story, we are still tempted to read him against Daniel, despite the latter’s quantum leaps in humanity. But Ty needs to stand alone. He is important to us, and specifically not to Daniel, because he does not suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, and yet, Ty is as troubled, self-centered, socially alienated and depressed as Daniel is. If we learn to love Daniel’s quirks and flaws, we have no choice but to embrace Ty’s as well, and therefore extend some compassion to ourselves in moments of turmoil and angst. Perhaps more importantly, our irritation with Ty reminds us not to let Daniel off the hook simply because he struggles with mental illness, and to hold ourselves accountable to the same standard of sociability that we wish Ty would. We remember, relearn, realize anew, that no person can be, should be, or would ultimately choose to be excluded from the world if they had their wits about them, which as it turns out, most of us can only lay claim to in the best of times.

Demers’ Vancouver hosts the nation’s intercultural class angst, from Quebecois squeegee kids picking cherries on what was once a site of Sikh labour exploitation, to the cross-country trip that will take Gary-the-first-nations’-landlord’s bone marrow to Halifax, feeding the body of his estranged brother, thus healing a decade’s-long rift between communist factions. The novel’s beauty really is in its minutia: sharp vibrant episodes invigorate what might be an unwieldy and underwhelming whole, but maybe this is the point. Much like its protagonist Daniel, The Prescription Errors veers between effectiveness and total overload. Its abundance of detail threatens to freewheel into complete disaster and mania, mirroring the mental gymnastics demanded by Daniel’s daily struggle with OCD. The novel forfeits complete coherence to kindness, sacrificing the reader’s comfort to an undiluted representation of Daniel’s experience.

Thanks to Demers’ sharp wit and linguistic flexibility, the novel succeeds in making mental disorder sincerely comical, without making fun, instead adopting the gentle humor recommended in coping with anxiety-disorder. On the other hand, the narrative’s frenetic quality and intentionally neurotic attention to detail pressures the theme of self-indulgence: struggling to remember the lesson we learned in perceptual compassion, we might wonder if Demers’ lost himself in the alternate lesson about self-indulgence. The Prescription Errors suggests we look forward to Demers’ next venture with anticipation. Readers will surely wonder what nooks and crannies he could possibly have left untapped: hopefully Demers will answer us with more stories that are as irreverent and thought-provoking as this risky experiment in compassion.