Author Charles Demers, The Prescription Errors (centre) and Vancouver Special.

Credit: supplied

BOOKS: Author Charles Demers two-times the city

Comedian-journalist-political activist-television host-author Charles Demers’ multi-hyphenate status rivals that of any reigning Disney teen sensation. As if to prove his breathtaking versatility, he’s releasing two books this week under the “author” component of his job title: The Prescription Errors, his first novel, and Vancouver Special, a collection of essays about the city he loves.

The first of these tells the story of two seemingly disparate Vancouver men — obsessive-compulsive Daniel, and foundering comedian Ty — each coming to terms with his own demons. With mischievous narrative aplomb, Demers keeps the two lives completely isolated (or so we think) until the novel’s closing chapter. The other book takes an unflinching and often hilarious look at the city, alternating between touching personal recollection and observational humour that seems tailor-made for a comedy set. WE caught up with Demers by phone from his Citytv office in between tapings for his weeknightly news-parody show, CityNews List, to talk about his literary double dip.

WE: So is it Charles or Charlie Demers? You use both professionally.
CD: My general rule of thumb is Charlie orally and Charles in print. And I think when I used to write for you guys, it was Charles. (Full disclosure: Demers did indeed write for WE, and his byline read “Charles”)

So two books at the same time. Are you trying to show off?
I’ve known that the novel was going to be published since spring 2008.The Vancouver book didn’t exist in anyone’s mind until this year. And now they come out within a month of each other. And it’s funny, people think it’s such a big deal ‘Oh, you’ve got two books coming out.’ Well, the novel could have come out anytime in the last few years. It’s mostly just coincidence.

What was your inspiration to write a novel?
It started out as this short, black-comic scene about a babysitter who rents A Clockwork Orange for a kid. I was working at the time as a researcher at VGH and it was really hard for me to go there because I spent a lot of time there as a kid when my mum was very sick. But as I was doing this research into medical equipment and how it came to be in the hospital and yada yada yada... It just got more and more numbing. And I thought ‘Well, what if somebody tried to do that on purpose?’ And that’s how that story of that guy babysitting became, at first, a novella, and then a novel.

And the thing with Ty was I’d been working with Phil Hartman’s brother on this cartoon thing (that nothing came of), and we were talking about whether The Simpsons still used all the voices Phil had created. They were now filled in by this voice actor, Maurice LaMarche. Now LaMarche is probably one of the most accomplished voice actors in the world, so he’s certainly not like Ty in any way, but, immediately, I was taken in by the idea of what if there was a guy who didn’t have his own list of accomplishments? It just seemed like the most existentially empty job you could possibly get. So I started writing that as a short story, and the more I was looking at the two, I found it harder to think of them separately. The themes of each of them were ultimately so similar: these two fundamentally selfish guys reacting to the fragility of people around them.

So it grew organically, over time.
Yes, I wasn’t Barton Fink [referencing the harried author in the titular Coen Brothers film]. The novel I’ve been working on in fits and spurts since about 2004. With the book of essays, Arsenal [Pulp Press] initially approached me about writing it early this year. So it was a much tighter timeline. The Vancouver Special book was Barton Fink. There were moments this summer when I was writing in hotel rooms [on tour with] Just For Laughs where Barton Fink was literally the only thing I could think of.

When they approached you, what were they looking for?
They asked me to pitch them a book about Vancouver and this book is, essentially, what I pitched. What I was trying to do was say there’s some really shitty stuff here, but there’s some really great history. I didn’t want to be ‘Everything is perfect’ pumping it up or ‘Everything is awful’ living in this crappy little suburb masquerading as a city. Interestingly, that hyper-boosterism and that hyper-criticism both come from the same place: this sense of insecurity.

Where does that insecurity come from?
Part of it is because we don’t have the engine to mythologize the city like New York or Toronto or Montreal. How many movies have you seen in your life that are set in New York? People who have lived their entire lives in Vancouver can watch a Scorsese movie and say ‘Yeah, that’s authentic New York.’ At the same time their local setting is completely remote to them because no one can afford to make a movie that’s set in Vancouver — let alone hundreds of them.

So what did you discover while writing about your hometown?
There’s this idea that Vancouver’s identity is rapidly changing and there is no core. But actually, the core elements have sort of been in place since the beginning. When you read something like Lee Henderson’s The Man Game, it’s the 1880s but people are eating sushi and smoking pot, and you think how much really has changed in the last 100 years or so?

Charles Demers launches The Prescription Errors and Vancouver Special this Thursday, Nov. 26 at Rhizome Café (317 E. Broadway), 7:30 pm. He can be seen weeknights at 6:30 and 11 pm on CityNews List on Citytv, channel 13. He will also be headlining the 12th anniversary of weekly stand-up comedy series Urban Improv with his CityNews List team on Monday, Nov. 30 at Chivana (2340 W. 4th), 8 pm. Tickets $7 from 604-733-0330 or at door.