Grantrepreneurs

by Jake Swan

Nick, a young physician disillusioned with clinical work, moves from small province New Brunswick to big city Vancouver to take a research position with a medical startup, A.I. Plus Womxn's Health Solutions. Nick quickly finds himself working in the company of "Grantreprenuers" - rogues of the business world who have created a financing model based entirely on the outrageous exploitation of public grant and subsidy programs.



When they seek to secure riches from Fisheries and Oceans for a koi fountain in their office building, Nick and his new friends soon are rubbing elbows with Chinese-Canadian gangsters, famous Canadian authors, and even the prime minister himself (in the midst of a cough-syrup-induced existential crisis).



It's a lot of fun until someone shows up dead in a koi pool.



With a scalpel-sharp wit, hilarious schemes and generous injections of heart, Jake Swan has written a page-turning, laugh-out-loud, idol-skewering misadventure.

176 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2023

Reviews

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's like living a happy nightmare," he told me.
I'm not sure what he means.

Having finished, and loved, Grantrepreneurs, I know of what its narrator means: I'm not sure what "he" means, either, but it really was like a happy nightmare, this book! Or like a latter-day picaresque—like Candide, by Voltaire, say, but one in which the picaro doesn't travel so much as have all the weirdness come to him in one place...more like the film Something Wild, then, in which we encounter a recognizable, but decidedly off-kilter "reality", whose increasing absurdity (whose happy nightmare) is orchestrated by a deft prestidigitational hand, one whose aim is satirical, certainly, but also, for all that, still recognizable and fully human—our deracination, like narrator/erstwhile medicine man and budding grantrepreneur Nick ("the scatter-brained guy"), is a relentless but gentle one, as we come to truly "see" what we've suspected all along, but took the entire novel to truly embrace: that "we're all weirdos," of course.

The journey from our bucolic New Brunswick of the mind to the Luilekkerland (Dutch: lazy-tasty Land, i.e. of Bruegel's "Cockaigne") on the west coast of Canada, where no one ever does an honest hour's work or behaves in any remote way decently (it seems), is sign-posted by numerous chapter-heading condiment "recipes", heavy on the high-fructose corn syrup, as if to remind us that we'll be taking more than one wrong turn away from the "natural flavours" of our previous existence into a more "one-dimensional life" of mediation and artificiality—of symbiotic government largesse and corporate greed especially, where we're all kept fish in an ornamental koi pond at the other end of the rainbow...Here, people are defined by the prescription drugs they take, the lists they make, by the sneakers they wear, or by their latest cockamamie get-rich-quick idea—all of which, incidentally, seem to work, somehow, even the public umbrella recipticles and the rhyming-crossword-puzzles-for-the-low-self-esteem-crowd, for everyone and everything is on the make and take in Vansterdam/Wrongcouver—yet almost mollifyingly, soothingly so...

The tutelary spirit which presides over the whole wiz-bang is the quintessential Canadian uber-artiste, Douglas Coupland (or entirely fictional facsimile of same, the copyright page assures us), who is even more tied into the giant grant application scam/corporate boondoggle which has swallowed the entire province than even the Chinese mafia. The narrative has a decided love/hate relationship with the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and Microserfs, and if he is in these pages as a warning or not is almost impossible to tell by story's end—whose many, many threads are so neatly tied that it would truly be a sin to spoil it here....

It takes a light touch to make this kind of thing work, and author Jake Swan has it, indeed: in Grantrepreneurs he has given us a book that continually surprises, by playing by its own rules, creating the aesthetic by which it wishes to be judged, not by following any a priori notions of what a novel "should" be.

[Jerrod Edson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cleanly-written, overtly sarcastic satire (think Chuck Palahniuk) about millennial ideals and the excesses of government spending. Swan is bold here, and takes his shots at the TikTok generation without apology. Fun stuff, no matter your age or what side of the aisle you’re on.

[Shawn Lawlor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun read! Swan’s satirical - though also oddly and frightfully accurate - take on government spending and the ability to obtain grants, while mixing in a difficult and heartfelt personal tale of a young doctor’s move to Vancouver was a great read. Highly recommend.

[Krista · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. I never got into the characters, didn’t enjoy it but pushed through to the end. If this is what counts as new content, satire that pushes the boundaries, count me out. Al least it was a quick read. Enjoy it if you can, not for me

[Lee Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Criminally under-read, under-sold, under-reviewed. This is very 'meta', but some review blurbs from last year:

[An entirely original and clever story, Grantrepreneurs borders on the absurd with its grant-obsessed employees, its koi-stealing researchers, its condiment-only dieters, and its skewering of Douglas Coupland. Just thinking about it makes me laugh.
Consumed by Ink

As barbed as Swan’s satirical thrusts can be, he also allows some of his characters to fall in love, form genuine friendships and even find the occasional moment of redemption.
The Miramichi Reader

“It takes a light touch to make this kind of thing work, and author Jake Swan has it, indeed: in Grantrepreneurs he has given us a book that continually surprises.”
W.D. Clarke