We reviewers regularly exceed our word counts by begging Canadian fiction writers to up the literary ante. Enough already with the rural incest weepers, the featherweight urban satires, the well-worn immigration stories, we rail. Where are you, oh Borges of Bonavista, Nabokov of Napanee? Lay down that semi-autobiographical psychological realism and expand our national literary imagination, why don’t you!

Well, that was me before Media Therapy, a novel so laden with vision and ideas and cultural insights and narrative experiment that I fell to the floor and cried for mama. Media Therapy may well be brilliant in some regards, but it defeated this reader.

Author Larry Gaudet’s near-future dystopia is one of countries managed by transnational corporations, and consumers managed by digital media. Every element of individual identity – each childhood trauma, each sexual proclivity – has been mapped into a vast communications network, so that boundaries between media and self have collapsed. Angst is treated using media therapy, a dubious psychoanalytic practice that smooths out the bumps in one’s personal narrative.

Our guide to this online nightmare is Nick Arvista, who describes himself as a former corporate propagandist – a radical version of our own era’s public relations hack. Nick presents the life and death of Paul Devorer, a ruthless executive turned “convergence prophet,” whose memoir he has ghostwritten.

It’s a solid satirical concept, and Gaudet mines it thoroughly – sometimes to excess. While Media Therapy features confident and original writing, the majority of the story is told in invented corporate jargon and therapy-speak. The lingo is convincing and appropriate, but it gives the novel a hermetic and abstracted texture. Combined with Gaudet’s oblique characterizations, cultural theorizing, and narrative subversions, the book becomes mind-melting chaos. Which may well be Gaudet’s intention, for all I could make of it.