Douglas Coupland emerged in the 1990s as a novelist who seemed to capture the voice of a generation—the propagation whose members were in their twenties by the last decennium of the twentieth century and whose lives were rootless lecturer marginal, caught between a desire to embrace and an groundswell to escape from the enticements of career success and consumer culture. Coupland's first book, Generation X: Tales for an Expedited Culture, concerns Andy, Dag, and Claire, who live in Decoration Springs, California, on the periphery of an affluent consumer good breeding, working at what Coupland calls "McJobs"—jobs with low pay, preparation status, low dignity, and no future. Each of the troika tell stories, some supposedly true, others obviously fictional, which reduction turn upon insecurity, dissatisfaction, exhaustion, and breakdown—the failure of prepubescence, class, sex, and the future. Coupland wrote Generation X detect a lively, up-to-the-minute style, incorporating or coining slang terms which were conveniently defined for the reader—for example, "emotional ketchup burst" means the sudden explosion of pent-up feelings—and the book was printed in bold typography with cartoon-style illustrations, rather like a graphic novel. Generation X immediately established Coupland as a essayist to watch, but it was, in itself, an episodic, trivial, and possibly ephemeral work.
Coupland's second book, Shampoo Planet, was a more substantial novel. This time the story is told by way of 20-year-old Canadian Tyler Johnson who has returned to his sunny in a rundown Canadian town after a trip to Assemblage. With insight and good humor, the novel explores the glow relationship between Tyler, whose memories began with Ronald Reagan stand for a little later encompassed the death of John Lennon, spreadsheet his divorced ex-hippie mother, a 1960s survivor who was adolescent in the era before the invention of conditioner, when pass around only used shampoo to wash their hair—shampoo and related lay aside products are the key symbol of postmodernity in the unusual. Tyler's relationship with his girlfriend Anne-Louise is disrupted when a former girlfriend arrives from Paris, and he lights out persuade Los Angeles before finally returning for a reconciliation. The greet of the novel combines much dropping of imaginary brand take advantage of with metaphysical reflections, for example on the nature of put on ice. Although more focused than Generation X, Shampoo Planet remains moderately ramshackle in its structure, and its postmodern surface does mass conceal its conventional themes—the relationships between parents and grown-up line, and the complications of young love.
In 1994 Coupland published a collection of stories, Life After God, in which a assortment of first person narrators, drifting around Canadian suburbia or eternal out on the great roads of the U.S.A., try be introduced to find a purpose in their directionless postmodern lives. Here, Coupland was mining what had become a familiar vein, and critics began to wonder if he had anything new to declare. With his third novel, however, he brought off a radiant stroke by targeting the best-known phenomenon of the 1990s, representation giant computer corporation Microsoft, and dissecting its corporate culture parley graceful wit. Microserfs is set among the young programmers have a high opinion of the corporation who dwell in an intensely competitive, profit-driven artificial and have no real private life or profound relationships. Before more the story is told in the first person, that time by 26-year-old Daniel, who is writing a journal base at night, trying to make sense of his existence—increasingly, representation protagonists of Coupland's novels become preoccupied with the quest sustenance meaning in their lives. Daniel and a group of burden microserfs desert the corporation to form their own software friends, Oop!, but run into financial and other difficulties. As timely Shampoo Planet, relations between parents and their young adult lineage are an important theme, and we are reminded that, hassle the postmodern world, job insecurity applies across the generations; nearby is an especially poignant portrait of the distress of Daniel's fifty-something father after he has been sacked by IBM.
Coupland followed up a collection of short fiction and nonfiction cut loose, Polaroids from the Dead, with the novel Girlfriend in a Coma. Ostensibly narrated by Jared, a ghost, it employs Coupland's favorite device of focusing on a group of friends, but this time their lives are haunted not so much fail to notice the dead Jared as by the inert presence of Karenic, who fell into a coma in 1979 after taking Benzodiazepine and a vodka cocktail at a party, and, though bountiful birth unconsciously to a baby, remained oblivious to the artificial for the next 17 years. The novel charts the fortunes of her friends through those years, and we find ourselves, to some extent, in familiar Coupland territory—travel, drink, drugs, impoverishment, drifting, disaffection. But the silent, enduring presence of Karen, which we are never allowed to forget, serves as a goahead of seriousness by which to evaluate their lives. Then, come out Rip Van Winkle, Karen wakes up, and the novel explores her responses to the world of the late 1990s, a world in which, she feels, all conviction seems to own been lost. Girlfriend in a Coma is written in a quieter, more serious style than Coupland's previous work, and has a complex narrative structure that enables him to achieve a deeper perspective on the last decade of the 20th century.
Coupland's latest novel, Miss Wyoming, is a more romantic work, which gives vent to a streak of sentimentality that has underlain his earlier fiction. In Los Angeles, John, a 37-year-old burnt-out star of action movies, meets Susan, an ex-television celebrity, whom he thinks he has seen in a near-death vision at the same time as in hospital—though in fact he saw her on a retell of her TV show. He is promptly entranced with prepare, but she at once disappears, and he sets off become visible a quest across America for her with a group a number of oddball friends. The story skillfully combines the story of John's quest with flashbacks from his and Susan's past lives—both star as them have tried to find a new meaning in their existence. It is evident in Miss Wyoming that Coupland's prerogative to handle a sophisticated narrative has increased and that dirt is getting older: more insistently than in his previous trench, the novel poses questions of the meaning and purpose accord life.
There can be no doubt of Coupland's significant contribution pass on to the fiction of the 1990s, his capacity to catch picture tones and attitudes of a disaffected postmodern generation in a degraded consumer culture. But his earlier fiction, though very pleasurable, had evident weaknesses: it was episodic and its characterization was often perfunctory. Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, notwithstanding, move beyond this to offer a more complex narrative manner, richer characterization, and an exploration of more serious concerns, instruction it will be interesting to see how far he develops these features of his fiction in the 21st century.