Dr Sad: David Bateman's voluptuous prose is darkly comic
19 Feb 2021.

by Drew Rowsome - photo by: Raymond Helkio

We first meet Stephen in 2006 in a Vancouver bathhouse as he "gets the job done" with some "corporeal cacophony" before getting on a bus to Tk'emlups (aka Kamloops) where is going to teach poetry and post-colonialism in modern literature. He also receives an HIV+ diagnosis that accentuates his general numbness, drinking, and penchant for finding the beauty in kitsch and camp. Value Village and the bottle are his temples. Underwater is where he feels safe.  He also embarks on a roundelay of furtive romances that both echo and parody the authors he is teaching, mainly Jane Austen and Walt Whitman. Though well-intentioned, Stephen is easily distracted - and rarely sober - so his teaching style is erratic if dramatic. A chance encounter blossoms into a complicated relationship, but something untoward happens and his teaching contract is terminated.
A more recent plotline has Stephen back from Tk'emlups and home in Tkronto (aka Toronto) preparing for Halloween trick or treaters. That the ghosts and morbidly humorous Styrofoam tombstones are reminders of his mortality does not go unnoticed, and a hapless man dressed as a tube of toothpaste does encounter a mortal end (at one point Dr Sad toys with becoming a murder mystery). Stephen however gets lucky with a masked man who he meets in the laundry room, with whom he embarks on a night of wild passion and possibly more. Though Stephen is a great fan of sex of most sorts - Dr Sad is saturated with the erotic and Bateman has a perceptive and mildly perverse eye for description - he is still locked in his head where any emotions have to be translated into poetry, words, in order to be dealt with. No wonder his poetic pen name is "Dr Sad."

Doctor Sad is author David Bateman's first novel. Not, by far, his first published work (TRANSmeditations, A Mad Bent Diva, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Fuck You: A Zine About Family) Bateman is also not a stranger to the stage (People are Horrible Wherever You Go) or screen (The Case of the Golden Purse) as well as being artistically active as a painter, blogger and performance artist. Bateman proves adept at a long form narrative, intersplicing two plots at two different times that eventually intersect. They are bracketed by later day musings, a prologue at the end, and the pages are liberally injected with poems and poem fragments. The narrator, Stephen, is primarily a poet though he too dabbles in other disciplines. Including teaching.

Dr Sad meanders through the two parallel chronicles to flower into a portrait of a gay academic/artist of a certain age as he deals with the self-created melodrama of his life. Though clearly not the role model that the opening prologue suggests, Stephen becomes a lovable sadsack of a rogue and one roots for him. And for his emotional breakthrough even though will shatter his carefully curated created-world. Like Stephen, the prose is often distracted in order to describe a fabulous fashion or decor find, a meal, an alcoholic beverage, or an incident either lived or observed. Each sentence is as much voluptuous as it is poetic. Stephen tells his student not to be afraid to use a thesaurus as a tool in creating poetry, he even carries one in his satchel, and Bateman has no such fear. Words and metaphors flow and ebb and jump in unexpected ways, before giving a precisely ambiguous rendering that is eerily evocative. There is much pleasure to be found, as in poetry, in just the words and their arrangement alone.

The tragedy of Dr Sad, is that it is coming out in the midst of a pandemic which limits marketing opportunities. I look forward eagerly to when this is over and Bateman has the chance to do readings in his unique idiosyncratic way. The man, like Dr Sad, is full of comic flair. Though the pandemic adds another unintended layer to Dr Sad. As Stephen struggles to ignore, embrace and find his way through being HIV+, it is rarely explicit, except for jarring asides and a continual awareness of the risks of physical contact, more a looming shadow that haunts the beauty of the world Stephen finds himself in. It is much like the not-quite dormant PTSD that was triggered in every gay man when covid began. But Bateman gifts us with a lyrical and enveloping prose poem on how to deal with it. Or an illustration of how not to.