Player One by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland and the
Fog of Literary Ennui.

I would be very happy if I loved Douglas Coupland the way fans of Douglas Coupland love him. To be honest, I would also be happy if I hated him with the passion shown by his detractors. Is he majestically brilliant, insightful  capable of spotting and naming cultural trends before we're even aware of them, or is he a loathsome carbuncle on the face of an already sceptic society? Seriously, both of these I found on Good Reads and Amazon reviews of his books. In truth, whilst reading his novels I find them engaging, witty in places, insightful and somewhat acerbic, but as I close the pages, the feelings fade, like a headache slowly lifting. When I think back to his novels which I've read, I realise there have been a surprising amount: Generation X, Generation A, JPod, Miss Wyoming, Girlfriend in a Coma, All Families are Psychotic. I wonder why I keep reading more when I can barely remember any of them. Is it the narcissist in me preening in front of the glossy covers of a completely consumed backlist - look how culturally attuned I am, and how avant guard, and how impossibly well-read! Yah, that sounds plausible. Possibly the most recent was Generation A, and there was something about bees. I remember thinking it borrowed from Viktor Pelevin's The Helmet of Horror in so far as there were multiple points of view and they all - did they? - slowly merge. I couldn't tell you what the others were about, although I could posit a passable synopsis. Something about modern culture, something about the commonalities and differences of human kind, something about cultural entropy, and so on. 

As I listened to Damon Albarn talk about the potential for pop music to endure instead of being disposable, it struck me that perhaps Coupland's books are anti-pop literature, anti-pop culture, and as popular trends fade in popularity, then so do the trends in antithesis. That would be harsh on Coupland, given the rather archetypal issues that his characters experience, archetypes that endure - loss of faith, religious fervour, lack of identity, emotional detachment, the seeking of connections, addictions, the careless hurts of family life, the atavism of humans freed of societal strictures - but it might be one of the reasons I didn't connect with this one, and haven't maintained much of a connection with any of his novels. They may have been seminal, they might have broken ground, but ground broken is ground broken; you do it once and then what?

Maybe that's it. Maybe it's a case of 'What now?' for Coupland and me. Maybe he doesn't go far enough - despite the interesting and handy but superfluous Future Legend he provides at the back for humans who survive the coming oil apocalypse - and like all things that don't fulfil promise, the connection just withers, fades, and dies.