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.