Generica

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Generica, which won the 2002 Leacock Medal for Humour, has been retitled
Happiness™ for its next print run. In one of his more inventive bits,
Calgary-based Ferguson has his hero, editor Edwin de Valu, quote a
review of Tupak Soiree’s What I Learned on the Mountain, the
“self-help book from hell” at the centre of this smart and biting
debut novel: “[Edwin] unfolded a creased photocopied page and began to
read from it: ‘This is a panacea for all human woes. It is the secret
of happiness, about which philosophers have disputed for so many ages,
discovered at last.’” So successful is What I Learned on the
Mountain that the book’s publisher and Edwin’s employer, Panderic
Press, is able to copyright the word (and concept) of “Happiness,”
marketing it along with a hundred other Tupak Soiree products.

With broad and biting sarcasm, Ferguson skewers the American publishing
industry in particular and the consumerism rampant in Western society in
general. Edwin, one of the few still untainted by Soiree’s banal
messages, has a vision: “He could see it now, spreading outwards
across the country: a network of rebels, an entire subculture of
non-happy people—the new minority, driven underground and forced into
a shadowland of black-market deals and secret handshakes. He could see
it: a subterranean world of people who refused to give up their bad
habits, who steadfastly (and nobly) refused to ‘capture their
bliss.’” Edwin’s determination to expose the book and its
mysterious cult author drives the novel’s final chapters.

L

j

, but, unlike the Baum novel, the message contained in the denouement is
dark and prophetic: be careful what you wish for—you may get it. A
very funny and insightful book, deserving (and receiving) wide
readership.