Worst. #Coupland. Ever.

Down the years, I've fitfully bemoaned the fall, then further fall, of one of my favourite authors, Douglas Coupland. Like the worst sort of earnest fanboy, I greet the arrival of each of his new novels with credulous excitement, only be cut down by grim disappointment at best and head-shaking disbelief at worst. But he's really done it this time.

With Worst. Person. Ever. he's reached a new nadir in which his remaining talent for spotting zeitgeisty themes (of which, yes, he's still got it) is utterly squandered in (yet) another random tale helmed by a deliberately offensive - and eponymous - narrator. Raymond Gunt (I kid not) is Coupland's worst folly to date - a character whose irredeemability seems initially a clever conceit, then an annoying one, then ultimately a catastrophic self-inflicted gunshot wound to whatever Coupland set out to achieve here. It can be a good thing for a novel to puncture precious taboos, but the reader needs to be brought along for the ride, not abandoned - as here - by a writer riding the one-trick shock-pony. It also helps to aim one's barbs precisely, but Coupland instead favours a blunderbuss approach that leaves one wondering what, exactly, he was hoping to wing. An ending, too, might have been a good idea, but this seems one of the novel's lesser crimes.

The best I can come up with this time is that, hopefully, this is rock-bottom.

Player One

Having already complained about its deviation from reality, it's about time that I got around to writing up Douglas Coupland's latest novel Player One (and, yes, this title is strangely familiar).

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Set largely in the cocktail lounge of a airport, the novel revolves around the fate of five disparate characters trapped there during the onset of a global crisis. Single mother Karen has flown hundreds of miles there to meet an online date; Luke is a pastor on the run having just ripped off his congregation; Rachel, the proprietor of a mouse-breeding business, is on the spectrum and struggles to understand other human beings; and Rick is the lounge's barkeep, about to fall prey to another get-rich-quick guru. Finally, Player One watches over the scene, commenting on the struggles of the trapped characters and predicting their next actions and fates. As the outside calamity engulfs the airport, they are joined by a psychopathic gunman, Bertis, who interprets the events as the coming of the End Times, a view that obviously puts him in conflict with the others in the lounge more keen to survive the conflagration outside.

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Another frustrating read from Mr. Coupland, once upon a time easily my favourite writer. It's nowhere near as underwhelming as his last novel, Generation A, but it is still disappointingly miles from the highs of his early career. And again for similar reasons: Coupland seems simply incapable of writing novels these days that occupy the same reality that we do. Infuriatingly, he begins very much in our world, and has his characters muse very convincingly about modern life, but before long he goes off at the deep end. While the calamity isn't completely outlandish here (cf. Girlfriend in a Coma), its cause makes its rapidity entirely unconvincing, and in spite of its crippling severity it practically evaporates at an unseemly pace at the novel's close. I kept thinking throughout that, surely, he could think of something - anything - more plausible than the scenario he paints.

It's (again!) particularly annoying because Coupland clearly has interesting things to say. At one point he does rip off one of his best lines, but it's still a great one, and the novel is (again!) full of other brilliant observations. To wit ...

Identifying the unique threads of the human condition is not something that Rachel approaches lightly, and she is not deceived into thinking that high technology is an activity that makes humans different: complex human activities such as enriching uranium, for example, are, by extension, elaborate means of generating heat and of fighting - and there's nothing special to humans about that.

Time and time again he conjures up clever and insightful lines about our daily lives and our place in the wider universe. But time and time again he undoes all of his good work by placing his eminently credible characters (autistic Rachel is particularly well-drawn) into eminently incredible situations that stretch the suspension of disbelief far beyond breaking point. And I can think of no good reason why he couldn't accomplish something far more insightful, or even profound, by just sticking to the real. How hard can it be for someone who's written Generation X, Life After God and Microserfs?

In passing, while I have moaned on excessively here, Player One did have a few redeeming moments which meant that, while I was left foaming at the mouth in consternation at the plot, I still enjoyed it enough to finish it quickly and to find it thought-provoking in places. For instance, Coupland's omniscient observer, the eponymous Player One, affords an interesting perspective on the transitory, largely meaningless and frequently facile nature of human life. It's a practically god-like narrator, but one coming from an unusually deist-like perspective. That was interesting. As were Coupland's characters' reflections on their lives which, given the situation they find themselves in, were at times touching and humane. All of which served to just annoy me more when Coupland decided to inject an insane jolt of surrealist plotting.

Doug: why, why, why, why, why?

Dear Douglas and Whit ...

At the moment, my reading material is Player One by lapsed-favourite Douglas Coupland. Today, I saw the film Damsels in Distress by the inveterately infrequent director Whit Stillman. I've loved the work of both in the past, particularly Coupland's Microserfs and Stillman's Barcelona. And while both of these two recent titles by Coupland and Stillman still have plenty to like about them, both also seems to suffer in comparison to earlier work in quite a similar way. Basically, they seem to have forgotten all about plot.

Not plot in terms of a densely but carefully constructed narrative, nor plot in terms of an enjoyable pot-boiler, but plot in terms of something that does more than intersect with reality at a tangent. In previous works, both Coupland and Stillman coupled their (respectively) philosophical and whimsical sides to narratives that bore more than a fantasy relationship with reality. But here, while both have pleasingly held true to the styles and tropes that first got me hooked, both have abandoned any pretence that the worlds they build and populate have more than a passing correlation with our own.

True, that's laying it on a bit thick, but what was wrong with sticking to situations and characters that touched base with the real at least once in a while?

Feet of clay

It's been a good long while since I last read a novel by Douglas Coupland, who, at least historically, is easily one of my favourite writers. He does not, to be sure, crank them out, but at the same time I have been stalling a bit on this one because I've been less a fan of his more recent work. That, and I've not been doing well of late with recent novels by authors that I've previously enjoyed. Can Generation A turn the tide?

Set in a near-future in which (projecting forward certain trends) there are no longer any bees to pollinate crops and flowers, the novel begins by introducing five diverse, 20-something characters: Zack, a slacker from Iowa; Samantha, a New Zealander with recently-godless parents; Diana, a Canadian with Tourette syndrome; Julien, a French World of Warcraft player; and Harj, a Sri Lankan call-centre worker left family-less after the 2004 tsunami. Though spread around the world, they become united by the same remarkable occurrence: they are stung on the same day by bees. Borderline-kidnapped by anxious authorities, they are each interned for several weeks in a featureless facility and subjected to a battery of tests to determine why they, of all people, were stung. The tests, which even involve strange assessments of emotional state, seemingly turn up nothing, and the five are released, now minor celebrities because of their semi-unique, social insect experiences. However, isolated by their new status and curious to meet one another, they gradually come together before, again, being semi-kidnapped and secreted on a remote Pacific island. There, under guidance of the mysterious Serge, they invent outlandish stories, bond with one another and slowly uncover the truth about the bees, their stories and an addictive, mind-altering medication, Solon, that is driving a wave of self-absorption across the world.

The above will probably immediately sound either intriguing or completely insane. As a fan of science fiction, part of me went into the novel holding the former opinion. But as a suspicious follower of Coupland, a larger part of me adopted the latter opinion. OK, well maybe not going quite so far as assuming "completely insane", but certainly my eyebrows and heckles were both raised.

Overall, it'd be accurate to say that this latter approach to the novel is the appropriate one. Generation A firmly falls into the category of lesser novels. Much as with its fellows in this category, this is largely because of its reliance on stupid or implausible plot elements. It actually doesn't start too badly on this front (the collapse of bee colonies), but then immediately takes a half-step in the wrong direction (5 protagonists coincidentally stung on the same day), before disappearing into a pretty absurd closing phase involving group storytelling.

Particularly annoying is that Coupland's writing is, on a sentences and paragraphs basis, up to his usual standards, and is peppered, as ever, with great Couplandisms about modern life. For instance, Harj on US geography:

And why are there two Dakotas? Why was your country's map-making and state building left to cartographers of such feeble vision? Could you not have at least named North Dakota something more dramatic, like Avalon or ... Heathcliff?

But all this cleverness and wry humour is just wasted in a novel whose plot makes it almost impossible to take seriously.

Worse, it's clear that Coupland has some interesting things to say behind this infuriatingly daft plot. For instance, though he articulates it fairly artlessly via the outlandish stories that occupy much of the novel's final third, Coupland is clearly concerned with aspects of modern life that lead to people disconnecting from wider society and becoming steadily more self-obsessed. He is also critical of the steady erosion of attention spans and what he sees as the death of the novel and, by extension, storytelling [*]. But expressing this so baldly via transparent and inane stories is patently not the mark of great writing.

What's particularly disappointing is that having characters telling zeitgeisty stories is also part of Coupland's first and best-known novel, Generation X. Coupland already knows how to do this, to do it well, and to do it within a plotline that resonates with contemporary life. Here it just feels contrived, shoe-horned into a largely ridiculous plot. And the choice of title of this novel, which obviously harks back to his first book, just seems like a crass attempt to cash-in on a bona fide classic. Generation X isn't my favourite of his earlier novels (though it's up there), but after reading Generation A I went back and flicked through it, only to be rudely reminded of just how good it is by comparison.

Overall, crushingly disappointing. I'm not sure if it's his weakest book to date, but it's definitely in the running. Which isn't to say that it has nothing at all to offer. If only. I think that the worst part of it is that Coupland clearly has style and substance and ideas, but that his sense of how to make a novel work has left him. He seriously needs to get back to his realist roots. Then his work stands a chance at being perceived, at least by this reader, as relevant rather than gimmicky.

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[*] He does this in part through an amusing story in which space aliens (from Gamalon-5) harvest humans for meat, and judge the best flavour to be found in readers of fiction. The aliens at first applaud the arrival of Amazon-dot-com since it increases book purchases (presumably real and virtual), but ultimately realise that this is down to the need of humans to own books, and doesn't actually translate into more book reading.

Top Ten Books

C was telling me yesterday about a feature that appears in her work newsletter in which senior management figures list their top ten books and describe why they like them. Avid reader that she is, she's already got a top ten and was thinking about whether to submit her books to the newsletter for universal acclaim/derision.

Not to be outdone, I had a think about what I would pick. It was quite a bit of a think since I tend to forget even great books (at least from my working memory). Anyway, in purely chronological order (ranking is dangerous), and strictly for today (might be different tomorrow), my top ten would be ...

The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke, 1956
A bad sign: starting with science fiction. Still, this is definitely a classic of the so-called "golden age" of the genre. It sports robots, aliens, a disembodied and benevolent AI, a deep mystery, a journey between the stars and tantalising glimpses of Grander Things. Marvellous.

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, 1973
A very difficult book to describe, and not one that would sound that appealing from a plot summary. A salesman gradually becomes insane, believes the writings of a hack science fiction writer are factual, and runs amok at a literary convention. But Vonnegut's writing (and drawings!) is melancholically brilliant and surprisingly humane. And he carries off introducing himself as a character fantastically.

Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks, 1990
One word here: structure. While set within the science fiction utopia of the Culture, this novel uses an impressive jumbled narrative to both take its central character on a journey to seek redemption, while delving into the reasons why this is required. The handling of its revelations is brilliant, being melded perfectly into the narrative. Not the most "world-building" of the Culture novels, but that's beside the point.

Brazzaville Beach, William Boyd, 1990
A biologically inspired choice here (there's another one later). This follows the life of Hope Clearwater, a biologist, through several strands of her life. Much of the novel takes place in a well-realised Africa, with civil war and Hope's research on primates providing its focus. The novel blends in science wonderfully, and contains some dark truths about the nature of human and animal conflict.

The Tortilla Curtain, T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1995
A great study in contrasts on either side of the wealth divide in southern California. One half of the novel follows a middle class writer, his love of the Californian wilderness and the threats he feels it's under. The other half follows a pair of illegal Mexican immigrants, pressed up against the hard realities of poverty and struggling to make ends meet. They occupy the same living space, but their worlds couldn't be more different, a theme that the novel explores as the narrative gradually weaves the two strands together. Without giving anything away, it ends with a brilliant moral cliffhanger.

Microserfs, Douglas Coupland, 1995
I simply love this novel. It may be that it embodied a time in my life that was particularly significant, but I think it's more than this. It basically tells the story of the lives of a group of Microsoft friends (the Microserfs) who quit that monolith to begin their own start-up company. That sounds rubbish, I know, but it handles the interpersonal relationships between the characters brilliantly (and lovingly), and speaks volumes about our lives today (at least to me). Anyway, it's a novel I've blogged about before (at length).

Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver, 2000
Another novel influenced heavily by biology. It's spread across three distinct strands: a young hunter drifts into the life of a lone biologist tracking wolves in the forest; a former biologist suddenly has to come to terms with the death of her husband; a pair of antagonistic old timers grudgingly come to terms with one another and their lives. Beautiful writing, with a real sense of nature, but written with a biologist's appreciation of the savageness that underlies its apparent beauty.

Unless, Carol Shields, 2003
While set around the quietly domestic life of a female translator and novelist, the novel is driven by her growing anguish at the apparent breakdown in her relationship with her daughter, and her anger at the casual sexism she encounters in her working life (expressed through a series of letters that she writes during the novel). These themes are not as isolated as they appear, and they are articulated in beautifully written prose. It's a real shame that Shields died shortly after completing this novel.

The Lay of the Land, Richard Ford, 2006
The "conclusion" of a trilogy of novels about the novelist / sportswriter / realtor Frank Bascombe. It probably isn't the best of the trilogy (the second novel, Independence Day, is more solid), but it's the longest, and immersion is the key here. Ford creates an internal life for Frank that's just amazingly well-realised, and the writing describing it is simply sublime. As with the "prequels", the events of the novel take place over only a few days, but the depth and texture of the writing makes it feel like you're with Frank for years (in a good way).

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon, 2007
Ah, the perils of adding a recently read novel ... I loved this trans-genre work (see here), but it's quite possible that I'll look back in bewilderment at a later date. It tries to take on the crime, noir and (possibly) science fiction genres, weave in some Jewish themes, while using literary flourishes throughout.

Coupland complete

Finished The Gum Thief. Hmmm. Definitely one of Coupland's minor novels, but not bad. By way of summary ...


The novel takes the form of "journal entries" written by about five different characters, together with chapters from a (short) novel one of the aforementioned characters is writing. There are two central characters, Roger and Bethany, co-workers at a Staples outlet (cue classic Couplandian discourses on printer paper and shop floor etiquette), but as the novel progresses a few more barge in to offer their perspectives. Roger is a 40-something divorcee, who has lost a child and is spiraling downwards with alcohol and a dead-end job. Bethany is a early 20s goth, somewhat lost in the world, with a mother she hates and a no-good boyfriend. The novel begins with Roger recording his thoughts in a journal (just like here!), but drifting into imagining Bethany's life. However, Bethany accidentally finds his journal and, after initial displeasure at being parodied, joins in by interleaving her thoughts with Roger's. Roger then begins to augment his entries with a domestic drama of a novel about novelists, while Bethany joins in with short stories about what it's like to be a piece of toast (again, classic Coupland). Eventually, the wheels come off of Roger's life, and Bethany is stood up by her boyfriend on a trip to Europe. However, the bond they've formed, and the other people they've brought into their lives, offer a lifeline that brings both of them back to a happier equilibrium.

As noted already, there's a fair bit of classic Coupland in this novel. Product placement, diatribes about the emptiness of modern living, clever existentialist conversations, ..., they're all here. However, as is the generally unsatisfactory plot. To be fair, he doesn't throw it away with a deus ex machina this time. There are two minor strands during Bethany's Eurotrip where she meets, improbably, Johnny Depp plus a regular customer from her store back home. They're a bit more low key than similar stunts Coupland's pulled before, and don't derail things. But the novel would clearly have been better without them [*]. Still, overall it's probably still one that fans of Coupland will get something out of.

How does it fit into the wider scheme of things? Well, I skipped Coupland's later novels (post-Microserfs) in my earlier post. But I suppose I could rank them now (at least how I see them now).

I'd definitely put Hey Nostradamus! top of the pile. Although, as a theme, it's becoming over-done, it does the whole high school shooting thing in a very convincing way, even if it does have one character narrating from beyond the grave.

Miss Wyoming is probably up next. Its improbable event is a main character being the sole survivor of a plane crash, although that's where it starts from rather than being something the that the novel pulls out of thin air halfway through. Another main character is a dead ringer for the drug-fatality Hollywood producer Don Simpson, although the novel rather tenderly rehabilitates him. It seems silly now, but I rather liked how Coupland took this celebrity car-crash from near his lowest point (i.e. he doesn't die in the novel) and spun meaning and redemption into his life. But, then, I'm always a sucker for redemption stories.

Although flawed, I reckon JPod is probably next. Here's what I said about this (to AMG) when I'd read it ...

Well, first of all, it's really not, as the blurb would have it, "'Microserfs' for the Google generation". In terms of its use of geek language and computer programmer-speak, it does resemble 'MS' very strongly. It also has much of the same sort of humour, possibly more in fact. What it doesn't have is the characterisation that brought Dan, Karla and the gang to life in 'MS'. I think it's got something to do with the way that Coupland uses extreme plot developments to move things along. He isn't happy to let characters develop on their own, so instead sets up a series of hoops for them to jump through. Some of the hoops are plausible, some less so. The net effect is that I didn't like the characters in the same way as those of 'MS'. I didn't feel I'd grown close to them, or cared so much about what happened to them. While the dilemmas that face the casts of both novels are somewhat similar, 'jPod' resolves them fairly soullessly. This isn't all bad, since it allows Coupland to be treat his characters (which include a version of himself - not as bad an idea as I thought it was at first) more humourously. He also gets some more politics in with some commentary on corporates. But at the end of it, it just felt like 'MS' with the heart sucked out of it. It's actually still a very good read, easily one of his better novels in the last decade ('Hey Nostradamus!', I think, is the best post-'MS'), but 'MS' it ain't.

Next up Eleanor Rigby, another novel which, while having some great Coupland-esque moments, doesn't quite stack up in the plot stakes. Utterly bizarrely, its deus ex machina involves an inexplicably radioactive meteorite, but the plot also crumbles under a rather unconvincing lapse of memory. I don't doubt that these things can happen to people, but I didn't buy it here.

Then we have All Familes Are Psychotic, a bizarre tale involving all sorts of improbable plot connections. It does, however, have one of my favourite Couplandisms in it:

One person in six million will be struck by lightning. Fifteen people in a hundred will experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity. One American in five will be a victim of violent crime. A day in which nothing happens is a miracle, a day in which all of the things that could have gone wrong didn't. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.

This captures something that's often forgotten about modern life. That for all the problems it appears to assault us with, it's really a remarkably safe and stable time to exist. Certainly, to my mind, compared to the sort of life that our ancestors, even recently, enjoyed. Or, rather, didn't enjoy. Anyway, aside from this, the book's just too mixed-up to my mind.

And that takes us back to Girlfriend In A Coma, which I've already ranted about ...

[*] For reference, this whole thing Coupland has about introducing improbable or semi-religious events is something I'd steeled myself to ask him about when I saw him at a book-reading in London. I was all set to do it, but before I had a chance, the person in the queue behind me hijacked him, and steered him onto a conversation about Chuck Palahnuik, another novelists she'd name-droppingly recently met. Curses. Still, I at least shook his hand. Anyway, maybe I should drop him an e-mail?

New Coupland

I've just started Douglas Coupland's latest novel, The Gum Thief. Which, as an aside, isn't even supposed to be out yet according to my beloved Wikipedia! (Obviously I've placed a comment on the article's talk page to correct this uncharacteristic error of Wikipedia ...) Nothing much to report on it so far, but it provides an excuse for my to jot down my thoughts on his earlier works.

The Gum Thief is Coupland's 11th novel (excluding one only published in Japan), and he's one of the few authors of which I've read all of their fiction (bar said Japanese novel). Rightly or wrongly, he's still associated in the public eye with his first novel, Generation X, a novel sufficiently famous that some people mistake it as being the origin of the expression "Generation X". While I don't think it's his best work, it completely omits the flaws that dog some of his later works, and it does feel (to get all postmodern about it) like it captures something very specific about the listlessness of "my generation" (= me). In terms of plot, there's really not a lot there, or, at least, one that I much remember. It's the characters and the situations they find themselves in that make it stand out. Well, these and the frequent dictionary definitions of eminently 1990s concepts such as McJobs, brazilification, the cult of aloneness, knee-jerk irony, etc. These definitions are accompanied by cartoons that ironically comment on the existential problems that feature prominently in the emotional landscape of "generation X" (e.g. "Dad, it says here [newspaper] that you can choose to have a life or a house - I'm choosing a life!").

Coupland followed this up with Shampoo Planet, a tale about a consumer products-obsessed teenager (hence the shampoo of the title) gradually growing up. I don't remember a whole lot about this one, but I enjoyed it, although the shallowness of the protagonist did take a bit of getting used to at first. His unselfconscious materialism does make him rather difficult to get interested in.

The next book, Life After God, is a very different affair. Rather than being a novel, it's essentially a set of short stories that overlap in tone and theme. They overlap to the extent that I first mistook it for a novel with a jumpy narrative, and the stories appeared to me to be organised such that they led to the climatic story ("1,000 Years (Life After God)"). Despite the title, the stories deal with God only tangentially, more as an absence rather than a presence. Which, I suppose, is probably what Coupland is trying to communicate. Perhaps surprisingly, given my predilections, I really took to these stories. Obviously, a connection with religion is beyond the pale for me, but part of me does recognise something missing in modern life. Not something that was present in the past (heaven forfend!), but a sort of awareness that much (almost all) of modern life takes place in a complete absence of awareness about our place in the universe. Not that one need worry too much about this really - obsessing about one's fundamentally inconsequential place in the grand scheme of things isn't terribly useful. But I do find comfort, of a sort, considering the vastness of things, and there's something of a similar feeling (to me anyway) in this book. Anyway, despite the foregoing, I don't think that Coupland (at this point in his life) has a huge amount of stock in God, but he's certainly beginning to lean this way. Nonetheless, I wasn't put off in the least by this aspect of the book, and overall Life After God is one of my favourites of his books.

His next book, Microserfs, is easily my favourite of all his works. I could go on at some length about why (I probably will in some later post), but a few of its qualities are illustrative. Firstly, its characters are great. This might just be because both they and I are pretty geeky, and that I identify with the self same issues that they do. That is almost certainly true, but to me they have similar vulnerabilities and a cute, low-key romantic view of the world that I'm always a sucker for. There's far more to say about the characters, but I'll stop for now. Secondly, the setting. At a surface level, a small IT startup doesn't sound like the sort of backdrop that would make for a good novel. However, it is, or was I suppose, extremely zeitgeisty back when it was published. More importantly, at least as far as I'm concerned, the scale of the setting made for very compelling in-group dynamics that rang true for me. That I was in such a group (albeit an academic one) around the time that I read Microserfs probably has some bearing on this. Anyway, I'll stop before this turns into a love-in for Microserfs. Suffice to say, in terms of its narrative, its themes and its characterisation, Microserfs wins hands down for me.

Something strange seems to have happened to Coupland as a novelist after Microserfs. Rather than writing realistic, zeitgeisty novels full of neologisms, product placement and contemporary themes, all of his subsequent novels introduce events that, at times, stretch credulity or place the novels at the borders of modern realist fiction. As it happens, the most extreme of these (and the one I've liked least) is, probably, the book he's most famous for after Generation X, Girlfriend in a Coma. While starting from a realistic, if unusual, premise - a comatose girl awakes after a decade or so - the novel ultimately runs riot introducing a compelling (at first) apocalyptic "end" to the world (aside from the central characters, people all over the world begin lying down, as if to sleep, and then dying), and finishing off with an explicitly religious message. While later novels have mostly not taken up religious themes (slightly non-conventional ones I might add), what they do share with Girlfriend in a Coma is its drift from the real world. All of them involve some sort of narrative break or discontinuity with everyday reality. In most cases it's simply some sort of improbable event, a deus ex machina, but to my mind it always detracts from the novels to some degree.

Anyway, I'd better just post this up. I'll return to Coupland when I finish his latest. So far it hasn't jumped off at the deep end, but there's plenty of time for that yet!