Victoria Times-Colonist review of HappinessTM (aka.
"Generica")
Original Wit, Rich Writing
May Brown
What if someone wrote a self-help book that really worked?
What if one book could help people stop smoking, lose weight,
improve their sex lives and relationships, get in touch
with their inner selves, realize their life-long dreams,
even get rich? What if one book could make people happy--really
happy?
Would that be a good thing?
That's the question posed by Will Ferguson's first novel,
Generica, the story of Edwin de Valu, an overworked,
underpaid editor of self-help books at a mid-size publishing
house. Edwin is a frustrated, cat-kicking, unhappily married,
boss-resenting man who's wed to a spinny Spandex-clad wife,
but attracted to a fellow worker.
His boss, a Baby Boomer who has pulled his thinning hair
into a tiny ponytail, compensates for his poor short-term
memory by turning conversations to tales from his youth.
Under pressure to present a new manuscript, Edwin rescues
one that he had originally thrown away, a weighty tome called
"What I Learned on the Mountain" which promises to help
people end bad habits, feel better about themselves and
achieve bliss. To everyone's surprise, the book is a runaway
success, triggering a mass epidemic of lifestyle changes
that threatens to shred the very fabric of American life.
Generica is a pleasure to read because of Ferguson's
original wit and rich writing style. It provides food for
thought, not for the self-help content within content, but
for the concept that smoking, fast food, drug and alcohol
addiction and poor relationships might be an essential part
of the machinery that drives an ambitious, competitive country
like the U.S. If there's any drawback to Generica,
it's the size of some of its philosophical passages, which
could use some paring to keep the story moving.
Shifting genres can be tricky for a writer. Ferguson's
other books have been non-fiction, three of them taking
gentle jabs at Canada. In Generica, his first fiction,
he sets his sights on the U.S., capturing the essence of
a driven society as it learns that it may need its despair
to realize its joy.
Although the novel's hapless Edwin de Valu seems somehow
impervious to the charms of the menace he's unleashed on
the world, we see a metamorphosis that satisfies us at the
end. Satisfaction, you see, is preferable to pure bliss.
Victoria Times-Colonist
May 20, 2001
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