Hal Niedzviecki goes to some very disturbing places in his new novel. Writing in terse, stripped-down prose, he tells the story of Maury, an ad man who runs away from his marriage when he can't handle the mess he's made of his son Danny.

But maybe he wasn't the one who made the mess. Maybe it was his fucked-up brother Cal that time Maury left Danny at Cal's house and who-knows-what happened when Cal locked Danny in the closet.

The book unfolds as a series of mysteries. Why is Danny so unmanageable? Why does he stab his teacher with a pencil? And where is Cal now anyway? Has he just disappeared or is he no longer alive? Maury abandons his life to find out.

Along the way Niedzviecki -- who's also a NOW film columnist -- gives us some soulful, beautifully written moments.

The segment detailing Maury's mother's God-questioning experience in the shtetl is killer. And a sequence in which the counsellors play war games with the kids at summer camp -- evoking some of the even more appalling midnight roundups some Jewish camps re-enact to teach lessons about the Holocaust -- is riveting.

But Niedzviecki loses his grasp of the story once the book focuses on the titular program, a virtual reality "game" invented by Danny so he can lose himself in cyberspace. It's a terrific idea but the concept -- and the suddenly much less penetrable style the author uses to realize it -- sends the book into sci-fi mode when it was doing just fine as a gripping tale of real-life alienation and regret.

But make no mistake -- Niedzviecki has definitely expanded his range and is taking new risks.

There's tons of talent here.

The Program
Bill Richardson
The Globe and Mail
March 5, 2005

'Strong is your hold, o mortal flesh. Strong is your hold, o love." These closing lines from Walt Whitman's The Last Invocation are an apt, if antique, summation of Hal Niedzviecki's fascinating and quite strange novel, The Program. It's about many things, but at root it's a cybernetic optic on the old, old war between the solid, limited flesh and the several unquantifiable forces that animate it: biology, history, soul; about the pain that comes from this forced and necessary cohabitation; and about the ways, often self-destructive, that we try to affect a resolution in this, the best documented conflict on the books.

The Program gives us the Sterns, three generations of cumulative neuroticism, living up, or maybe down, to Philip Larkin's "they fuck you up" declarative. Bubby Stern, the matriarch, spends her days in front of the television. She worships a soap-opera character named Temple, as a way of displacing the past and cauterizing old psychic wounds: the war, and the mysterious, dreadful vision visited upon her in the synagogue (i.e. the Temple) in her girlhood shtetl.

Bubby has two sons. Cal, her youngest, is a poetic, unanchored soul whose tendency toward the obsessive-compulsive spirals into something much nastier. He does time in a tightly guarded ward, and eventually bolts from a halfway house and vanishes. Between Cal and his nephew, Danny -- Bubby's only grandson -- something unspoken and unspeakable had passed. A few years after whatever that event was, Danny -- bright but odd, developmentally arrested and teetering on the edge of something like autism -- takes a tumble and slips into a coma. His father, Maury -- Cal's older brother and Bubby's first-born -- is then derailed. He senses that his mad brother is in some way complicit in this trauma, and sets off in search of him, eventually abandoning his wife and son and advertising career to follow a series of vague clues.

Danny emerges from the coma to wander an eccentric path that leads him to the lab of a Steve Mann-like professor who styles himself a cyborg. Danny becomes one of his disciples in this world of weirdly machine-assisted living, and goes about everywhere disporting the obscuring glasses that are the brand of this emerging race of control freaks. Strange, bad things happen. No one ends up well.

Niedzviecki's purpose and aesthetic are not linear, and you'll get, perhaps, the idea that The Program resists easy plot summation. Nor can you easily line up and name its many ideas about the coded sequence of culture and history; about the complex "program" that powers and manipulates our days and ways; about the false gods we commandment-breakers have chosen to worship.

Maury is the author of Get With the Program: The Power of Slogans, a book that has made him a marketing guru and has informed the industry that keeps his mother anaesthetized in front of her TV with its incessant bleat of commercial "be happy" messages. The poetic Cal, who tried to follow his big brother's lead and forge a career touting the virtues of toxic substances, is driven mad by this ill-advised, environmentally specious rechannelling of his nature. And Danny, Maury's son, sets out to subvert the empire his father helped to build by allying himself with another kind of authority figure, the cyborg professor, dangerously avuncular, whose whole purpose is to control and subvert the barrage of messages, of slogans, with which Maury and his ilk have filled the air. To this end, and as a way of achieving a sweet oblivion that might be transcendence or might be nostalgie du coma, Danny writes his own Program.

Every writer wants every reader to "get" his or her book, to appreciate all its subtleties and nuances, to palpate its allusive tissues and feel the warmth rising from its most obscure pulse points. Hal Niedzviecki is a gifted writer, thoughtful and insightful, and while I was held by The Program -- I read it in one long sitting, West Coast to East Coast, at 39,000 feet -- I was also aware that I was/am not a member of its ideal audience, doddering as I am, and stubbornly fond of more conventional narratives.

A younger reader, or a reader with more elasticity of brain, wouldn't have been troubled, as I was, by the sense that there was something here, a kind of humour resident in the style, that was passing over or around me. Sometimes, especially in the latter parts of the novel, there are sections of cultural criticism that are interesting in and of themselves, but are an awkward narrative fit, as though they've been transplanted from some other source.

That said, and despite whatever emotional distance might have lived between this reader and the material at hand, I never felt I was wasting my time -- I mean, I could have been watching Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere in Shall We Dance, and not once was I tempted to do so. And there were several sections of the text that flew off the page and went straight to the arts and humanities chakras that were in need of massaging. Maury's and Cal's boyhood summer at the Zionist summer camp, for instance, which is loony and antic; Bubba's shtetl experience; and most wonderful and awful of all, the story of Patricia Stern, Cal's ex-wife, an overburdened social worker.

The Program is fascinating in many ways, and in every way original. It mostly made me happy, and will make other, differently programmed readers more so still.

The Program
Lindsey Wiebe
Winnipeg Free Press

It's impossible to read the sparse, fragment-heavy prose in The Program without recognizing the parallels drawn to the novel's isolated central family.

This reflection of substance in style is just one way in which Toronto author Hal Niedzviecki shapes his present-day dystopia, an all too familiar world of fragmented relationships, advertising jingles and emotional disconnect. The Program, Niedzviecki's third novel, is both fiction and social commentary. At its heart is Maury Stern, an advertising executive who thinks in product slogans.

Maury's tenuous relationship with his wife, Becky, is held together by Danny, their introverted and emotionally stunted son.

This fragile connection shatters when Danny is injured in a camping accident. Maury leaves the family soon after, unable to deal with his wife's anger and his son's condition.

Weaving in and out of the story are the rest of the Sterns: Maury's mother Bubby, who lives vicariously through daytime television shows; and Maury's troubled brother Cal, absent for reasons never fully explained, but described in memories.

The Program is told through the voices of its many characters and has little chronological organization, slipping easily from Cal's childhood recollections of a Jewish summer camp to Becky's attempt at marital infidelity.

Those characters not central to the story appear at times as rough caricatures, though their lack of depth may well be an intentional move on the author's part.

Some characters appear to exist partly to convey the book's themes, such as the Professor, Danny's mad-scientist-type university instructor. "The world has become mechanistic," says the Professor. "We are trapped in the mechanism and, just like the bees, even those at the top of the hierarchy go through the motions."

This drone-like existence is exemplified in personalities such as Danny's mechanically helpful school guidance counsellor and firm, conventional principal.

Niedzviecki is a prominent non-fiction writer and journalist; he was also the co-founder of Broken Pencil, a culture and indie arts magazine. Here he isn't afraid to poke fun at the absurdities of popular culture, exploring a Disneyesque theme park and offering up Bubby's full television schedule, from Talk Talk Talk! with Dini-Betty Cindy Lou at 1 p.m. to Ain't That Pet Amazing at 8:30.

Some of the book's casual ironies seem slightly heavy-handed, such as Becky's fixation on a happy face poster in the school principal's office while discussing her son's violent outburst at a teacher.

Through all the book's wry humour, its characters always seem to be in on the joke, subconsciously recognizing the modern stereotypes they perpetuate. However, at times the varying scenes and isolation felt by the Sterns make The Program feel more like a series of loosely connected short stories than a cohesive novel.

Readers may find it difficult to become lost in a novel that is at once a disjointed family saga and a consideration of isolation in modern society. The Program will appeal most to those able to appreciate the emotional complexity of its characters without being deterred by the book's astute social observations.

Searching for reality amid chaos
Mari Sasano
The Edmonton Journal
March 13, 2005

Hal Niedzviecki has had pop culture and identity on his mind since 1995,when he started Broken Pencil, a magazine covering 'zine culture and other independent arts. In his recently published non-fiction book, Hello, I'm Special, he describes a world where anything goes while people demand ready-made spiritual experiences -- an unbounded life free from actual danger or difficult choices.

Where Hello, I'm Special worked in case studies and generalities, his latest novel, The Program, takes on the specific problems of the Stern family, who are drowning in memory, search for identity and the terrifying potential of the future in their dysfunctional relationships.

It's also obsessed with the ubiquity of cameras, our modern mania for documenting "reality" and our reliance on saved images to structure our memories. The Program also refers obliquely to Cyberman, a CBC documentary about a man who has built a wearable computer to mediate, record and share his experiences -- not because he thinks that computer technology is superior to the flesh, but because he deeply distrusts our blind faith in surveillance technology. His wearable computer, he says, is a way to connect to people, not distance ourselves from our communities: "observation needs company," he writes in an essay posted at www.cbc.ca/cyberman.

Shared experience is the life work for Maury Stern: as a marketing guru, he tries to find the images and words that resonate the most strongly to a product's potential audience. Maury is a self-made man, the son of Holocaust survivors. He takes his son, Danny, on a camping trip, but can't stop himself from experiencing it in terms of advertising slogans: Kodak moments, time for a Nescafe, you deserve a break today. At the same time, Danny is drawn to the forest, to the darkness and to the wolf pack that howls at night. "Things happen," he thinks, "What do words do? Words don't happen."

But the book is about words and meaning. Niedziecki writes in a terse prose, a workaday e-mailable business language. This is not the evocative minimalism of poetic language. This is the lowest common denominator "plain language" that hopes to let us see things plainly, as they are. Fat chance. "Grammar turns one thing into another."

We feel as if there are no limits, but there are: the more we try to reconcile our understanding of how things "really" are, the more we find ambiguities and inconsistencies. When Danny falls into a coma following an accident in the woods, the secret of Maury's family history emerges out of its silent denial: did something happen to Danny one night at his uncle's house? What ever happened to Maury's brother, Cal, who disappeared some time after the alleged incident? Something certainly happened to grandmother Bubby Stern long ago in the old country. But the truth has become lost in perception, semantics and just plain forgetting.

Danny, once he regains consciousness, searches in his own way: he begins to work on The Program, a computer-mediated interface that helps him edit and record reality in a way that he finds more tolerable than the disordered chaos of his human senses. But like Maury, he discovers that there is no escape from the mesh of lives that links his family together.

Memory is a tyrant. We have no control. Reality has no respect for narrative. What's done is done. And yet, "Something happened, even if nothing happened."