Review: “Dr. Identity” by D. Harlan Wilson

“You simply can’t be afraid to serve the world a big silver platter of F**K YOU now and then,” states Dr. Identity, a clone, to his human (but somehow lesser realized) counterpart Dr. Blah Blah Blah in D. Harlan Wilson’s dada-science fiction-freakout novel “Dr. Identity”: a major “fuck you” to authority, tradition and consumerism comparable to the works of William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick.

Dr. Blah is an professor of English – a “plaquedemician” – a man as highly educated as he is worthless in a future world of ultraviolence, frivolity and celebrity-gone-wild. His institution, “Corndog University”, requires all professors to pick a literary figure and change their legal and physical identity to match – a subtle jab at modern academe’s tendency to stifle original and creative thought among professors in favor of supporting the status quo .

Nearly everyone of means in Blah’s world has a doppelganger who can be sent to work in their stead and perform other onerous chores. One day Blah activates his own, Dr. Identity, sends him off to teach a class, and everything goes to hell. Identity accidentally kills a well-heeled student with a battle ax, and Blah – as Identity’s owner – finds himself legally responsible for the incident.

Blah falls into a state of sniveling panic, but Identity (symbolically and literally Blah’s self-realized alter-ego) will have no part of it, and instead drags the professor along on a sprawling massacre through future Amerika.

Nearly every aspect of modern society is satirized in this journey. Wilson’s “Dystopian Duo” match blades and bullets with the Pigs (genetically engineered porcine cops), the press (”Papanazis”), the public (idiot celebrities), and politicians (who represent insanely irrelevant political parties like the Pogocrats – who bounce on pogo sticks).

They even jack into the internet – here the “schizoverse”, an alternate reality where everyone becomes an embodiment of their id, alternately fighting or f**king everyone else in sight – a hilarious parody of real-world online communities that seem to always bring out the worst in some people.

The jarring truth of “Dr. Identity” is that sometimes we, as human beings, express ourselves more fully and authentically through our fictions, seen here in the relationship of Dr. Blah (who hardly has a ‘real’ identity of his own) and his ubermensch artificial companion Dr. Identity, who is everything Blah wants to be but is only too frightened to dare.

Wilson’s satiric little novel will probably go down like a cupful of razor blades for readers used to tamer fare, but for others “Dr. Identity” will be a great, challenging read. Reading it is like wandering a hall of mirrors: each page presents a monstrous but all-too-recognizable vision of our own world.