douglas coupland

SweetBirdOfTruth

loved microserfs, hated all families are psychotic

SweetBirdOfTruth

[contains spoilers]

our lives are geared mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probability. … one person in six million will be struck by lightening. 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 victim of violent crime.

there's more bad luck in this book that you'd find in the nashville top twenty. run the list on this one when you get to the end and tot up what you've got:

the youngest son is clinically depressed, the mother, step-mom and eldest son all have hiv/aids (mom and step-mom get infected on the same day by the son in what ought have been comical circumstances but aren't), the father has liver cancer, the daughter is a victim of thalidomide and is missing a hand, the daughter's husband is screwing around, as was her father and her mother's father (he with the mother's best friend - all families are psychotic and all men are bastards?), the daughter is hankering after zero-grav sex with her space shuttle co-pilot (did i say the daughter was an astronaut? or does this begin to sound more and more like a bad splice of eastenders and the simpsons?) (and need i tell you that she's making eyes at the husnband of the wife her husband is screwing around with?) the wife of the eldest son is a born-again recovering-alcoholic addicted to twelve step programmes (and now we're adding in fight club - talk about trying to push all the right demographics) … there's more, believe it or not, there's still more. mom, step-mom and son #2's girlfriend get caught in an armed robbery, son #2's girlfriend has a womb to rent … oh i give up already and we're only just about up past the half way point of the book.

whereas some books ask for the willing suspension of your disbelief, this one asks you to tether it to a weather balloon and let it fly off into the upper atmosphere where the rarefied air'll make it hallucinate better.

the brute truth of the matter here is they're all just caricatures of characters infesting this low-rent novel. in other hands - with it set in florida you don't have to think hard to imagine what carl hiaasen would've done with the bones of this plot - this effort ought be comical, but it's not. the whole thing begins to read like a bad sit-com with the laugh-track on mute. in a word, it's orrible.

what is it with canadians and irony? coupland is trying to shovel it on in spades here. take the would-be suicidal brother who gets jealous of his elder brother and mother being shot by their father

god, i'd kill to be shot

- hello? or the mother, whose daughter is deformed because she took (then legal) thalidomide to stave off morning sickness during her pregnancy and takes (now illegal) thalidomide to stave off the mouth ulcers her hiv/aids infection brings. just because americans don't get irony doesn’t mean canadians have to make up for the continental deficit. without wanting to go all ed byrne/alanis morissete - it's not ironic, it's just ****ing stupid.

surfing the zeitgeist is one thing, it's coupland's thing, it's his usp. he did it well with microserfs, but there's gotta be more to it than throwing in a bit of gene-splicing, some no logo-lite crap (boy-meets-girl while burning down the gap and ripping up some genetically modified crops) and writing about geriatrics on the internet:


when she arrived at the internet café godless children in black outfits up near the front casually sipped elaborate coffees that in the toronto of her youth would surely have been banned as threats to society. the shop's background music was a popular song apparently called "boompboompboompboompboompboomp." … the counter girl was wearing what appeared to be a blue nightie, and her eyes were smeared with mascara. janet had given up on youth fashions with the sex pistols in 1976. young people could wear green plastic trash bags for all she cared, and apparently some of them did.

coupland has a competent and even efficient writing style, the words fall in the right place and at a reasonable pace. but that's about all i can say of it. he's not funny, even when dealing with this ridiculous scooby-doo plot (they even all get to pile into an orange camper van before chasing after the villains! and following on from the fun loving criminals, we can pretend that the pill popping of mother and son #1 (their hiv/aids pill cocktails) takes the place vacated by scooby snacks)

and he's certainly no deeper than a shallow puddle:

a day in which nothing happens is a miracle, a day in which all 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.

so does that sum up coupland's whole argument then? to twist marshall mcluhan, the tedium is the message? is that where the modern novel is at?

it's true, yes, i believe, most all of us have a gd bk inside of is, and the real job of the literary editors should be to decide whether it's worth letting that tome escape us. they were right about coupland's microserfs, definitely, one hundred per cent. the good book that should be released to the world. having only read about the others without ever being really attracted to them (despite their gaudy come-thither covers) this is the only other coupland i'm competent to comment on. and all i can say is that it would be better in than out.

Excelsior

I find it amusing that you comment on Coupland's lack of message and his merely "efficient" style without reading Life After God, (a book with a message so subtly transmitted that it took my breath away), Generation X, the book that remains for me the definition of what a good style can do to a book, and Girlfriend In A Coma, a book that, however flawed, in my opinion merges the two brilliantly.

It is fine to review a book having read no others by the author, naturally enough. However, it is foolish in the extreme to critique the author without a thourough understanding of his work, and I might argue, his context, his influences and his intentions.

For my part, I agree with Tom Wolfe, (a master) who has the greatest admiration for Coupland.

Unfortunately for his fans, I reckon there is a good chance he will put away his Mac for a while and focus on sculpture.

I strongly advise you pick up any of the books mentioned above, or Shampoo Planet or Microserfs or Polaroids From The Dead.
Alternately, he has some truly excellent fictional and non-fictional essays on his website at:
www.coupland.com

SweetBirdOfTruth

excelsior - i'm criticising this book, first and foremost. i know it's a long post above and i dn't expect you to have read all of it, but from what little you read surely that is obvious?

i should not have to read all his books in order to express an opinion on one single book. there's no other author i have to be completist about in order to have an opinion on a single book. yes, i believe in the notion of oeuvre but i also believe that the individual texts should stand or fall as individual texts, first.

i have read microserfs, and generally liked it, though like a lot of people i know, belive it fails in the second half. but ho hum.

as someone clever once said: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. coupland's fooled me once. maybe, one day, i'll get around to giving him a chance to fool me again. but i'm not rushing in.

as for his sculpture - i actually do like a lot of modern art, but what's to be said about the six-foot plastic soldier pictured on the inside cover of all families?

bonkey

Originally posted by SweetBirdOfTruth
or the mother, whose daughter is deformed because she took (then legal) thalidomide to stave off morning sickness during her pregnancy and takes (now illegal) thalidomide to stave off the mouth ulcers her hiv/aids infection brings.

Small point, but IIRC, thalidomide has recently shown itself to be a wonder-worker in the fight against HIV and AIDS. So much so, in fact, that serious work is being done to produce a "non-dangerous" version of it - one which carries its benefits but wihtout its side effects.

Also, for what its worth, I was of the belief that thalidomide is actually legal for this use (anti-HIV) at present in the US.

I could of course, be wrong.

and the real job of the literary editors should be to decide whether it's worth letting that tome escape us.

Nope. A publisher's job is to decide if something will sell, and hence should be published. An editor's job is to make sure the book is "correct" - fixing grammar, structure, and content, to try and make the best book possible, within the confines of how many pages the publisher is willing to allow it to run to.

On one hand - very interesting post. Good review of a book you didnt like. This does not mean the book is without merit - just that it is without merit for you. Which is the other hand - while you can moan that this is not a comparable book to Microserfs. What you never asked, however, was whether or not it should be comparable.

I find it interesting that when an author tries a different style, they very often get criticised for their work "not being in the style of X". Why should coupland treat all subject matter the same? Even if this book is completely different in style to his earlier material, that is not a failing in and of itself.

Personally, I havent read any of his stuff. Its on the list. I'll get there someday.

jc

SweetBirdOfTruth

i wasn't actually looking for another microserfs. i was just looking for an enjoyable book. i just couldn't get this. i think the plot has lots of potential, as a comic farce, and if michael stipe's crew ever do turn it into a film, it ought be a good one. but in coupland's hands ... i dunno, it just didn't work, on it's own, not even in comparison with his other bks or even with how (say) carl hiaasen would have wrote it. reading this, i just don't think coupland is a good novelist. reading microserfs i thought he had the makings of a good novelist.

it's hard not to know about coupland, to not know that he's of the zeitgeist. and - after reading this - it's hard not to say he increasingly looks like just another write-by-numbers formula author. throw in a bid of this (cloning) add a bit of that (globalisation) mix with some of this (the internet) and voila, you've got a book. there's more to writing than just stringing the words together in the right order.

i agree with you though, yes, it's me that this didn't work for. but then, aren't all our opinions just personal?

neuro-praxis

"All Families Are Psychotic" is waiting nearby for me to read, I'm currently reading "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk and don't want to read Coupland at the same time.

I have to say though, that I've read every one of his other books and, overall, found them to be superb, with the exception of "Miss Wyoming" which dragged a little. I won't go into an in-depth analysis of the messages that Coupland offers us, but I will say to SweetBirdOfTruth that you shouldn't give up on him.

In my opinion, his writing style expresses a sensitivity to surroundings and an insight into personality (his characters generally being better than his plots) that allows him to put into words the things that we have always known, but never been able to voice (or write) eloquently or satisfactorily enough ourselves.

I love Doug.

I edited for spellings.