DAVID BATEMAN’S FIRST NOVEL

Dr. Sad
By David Bateman
309 pages, paper
University of Calgary Press

Although semi-autobiographical in content, David Bateman’s first novel should be savoured for its tone rather than the correlation between autobiographical fact and fiction. Its narrator is Stephen Andrew Davis, hence the acronym Sad, which also connotes a seasonal affective disorder.  Stephen is a middle-aged gay academic who is a poet, performance artist, and a self-admitted “footloose crossdresser” with a “bargain-hunting nature” (especially when prowling a Value Village). Bravely anti-establishment when it comes to gender codes, Stephen’s poetic and private voices have comic edge, his personality in the classroom marked by signature sarcasm and a sense of sharp parody. He is by his own admission, a person who is “extremely organized with a foundation of chaos”—and this paradoxical anomaly is a vital ingredient of his personality and character.

As its subtitle indicates, the novel spans a month and a day, moving back and forth between Toronto (where Stephen has an apartment in a co-op building) and Vancouver, where he is a writer-in-residence who teaches creative writing in Kamloops, B.C. to university students not particularly in key with his own penchant for William Carlos Williams or indulgence in wordplay and such forms as the limerick, haiku, and other orthodox poetic forms. In Toronto, Stephen sometimes has the occasional company of a small number of disparate societal misfits, the most vivid one being Irene, who returns to the city after an ill-fated romance in Malfi with a “kind, gorgeous, generous, intelligent idiot” who “lacked the ability to put up with [her] bullshit.” Stephen and Irene enjoy hunting for Kitschy objects, Stephen believing implicitly in the iconic nature of Kitsch. A hand-decorated vase made in Japan that had belonged to his father, is an emblem of his peculiar taste and of his conflicted feeling about the vase that he loves but wishes to get rid of. Toronto is also where a serious yet absurdly comic accident occurs on Halloween, pointing up life’s accidental ironies.

In one sense, of course, the story explores the distance between queer Toronto and a small university campus. In a deeper sense, it is a journey into Stephen’s mind and psyche. Both explorations are tragicomic in tone, for Stephen (Dr Sad) is diagnosed with HIV at the campus clinic, whose counsellor provokes his satiric anger by a tactless question. Stephen’s high velocity riff is a gem of madcap parody, encompassing such things as Edvard Munch, Mary Poppins, Michelangelo, and assorted contemporary pop references, all of which comprise a tirade that ironically indicates his “gaily euphuistic way of coping.” Vancouver is where he meets Dan, also HIV poz, a wealthy man with a very troubled son. This amatory affair gives rise to hot sex scenes, the best of which is their “one-on-one sex-aquacade” in a Banff resort.

Although I don’t think that the programmed alternating shifts or transitions from Vancouver to Toronto really help the structure, the fiction is shot through with delicious satiric verve and camp humour. I also wonder if the progression from one literary draft to the next in Stephen’s practice of poetry and performance art is absolutely necessary, but, again, there is much to relish in Bateman’s queer (pun intended) sensibility, where the protagonist is frequently the target of his own deadly wit. Stephen’s sharp views on postcolonialism (especially in Canada) lend ballast to the satire, another remarkable layer in tone and characterization being his inherent melancholy (verging on melancholia). The absurdist and camp fuse into a hybrid portrait that is compellingly comic and sad. As Stephen himself notes, his own poetry and writing, his entire philosophy of life, is like “a Bee Gees lyric,” serious and comic simultaneously. Stephen sums up himself: “ultimately it was all just a song of himself, lacking in strict continuity, filled with flights of fancy mired in memory, and littered with melancholy glee.” And his signature gesture is raising a glass to trauma.