coupland

Mon Aug 14 16:27:15 CDT 1995

     While I think Wayne is giving Coupland, and the experience he tried to 
     render in _GenX_ and, subsequently, in _Life After God_, short shrift, 
     I must admit that I don't think Coupland does enough to be taken as 
     seriously as it appears he sometimes he wants to be taken.  I read 
     somewhere that he went to art school, and that experience really shows 
     up in his writing style, in that he boils down his fiction into short 
     pieces and polished images that are probably be best appreciated 
     indivdually, but may not necessarily mean a whole lot once they are 
     strung together, which is why I think _Life After God_ may have 
     succeeded as a "serious" work where _GenX_ looked more like a tacky 
     literary effort disguised as a highly self-conscious "ironic" comment 
     on the act of writing.

     But to compare him with Pynchon seems to me just not done.  I see his 
     writing as something more along the lines of a better than average 
     social commentator, rather than a blood and guts novelist.

     Greg

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Subject: Re: coupland
Author:  INTERNET:wcunning at imagine-inc.com at CSERVE
Date:    8/11/95 8:17 PM

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To: pynchon-l at sfu.ca
From: wcunning at imagine-inc.com (Wayne Cunningham) 
Subject: Re: coupland
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 1995 17:26:45 -0700 
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>Having never posted to the list in some 5 months of reading it, I feel much 
>like a child among giants, but last night I read a book that I found quite 
>enjoyable, if not of the complexity of much of what's discussed here.  The 
>book was microserfs, by Douglas Coupland, and I was wondering if anyone 
>else had picked up any books by him, and what the consensus might be. 
>(lots of stuff discluded) Coupland
>seems somewhat concerned with this "energy," but moreso in chronicling how 
>america has grown beyond the scope of its great novel of today, if not in 
>the sophisticated manner of GR.
>jonathan shainin.
>shainin at worldweb.net
I've read Generation X, Coupland's first major book, and I must say that, 
while I enjoyed it, I didn't think it really captured the spirit of the 
20-nothings, of which I was a part at the time.  The plot of the book was 3 
friends hung out and told stories to each other, then moved to Mexico to 
open an artists hotel.  I thought the ending was kind of lame.

I've read excerpts from microserfs, and it does seem like Coupland's 
writing style is influenced by Pynchon.  There's a short story by Pynchon, 
I think its called Death and Mortality in Vienna, which has the same kind 
of tone as the stuff I've read by Coupland.  The main character in the 
Pynchon short has a lost, yet reflective quality like many characters in 
Coupland's writing. Of course, maybe Pynchon was predicting my generation, 
and Coupland is reporting on it.

Regards,

Wayne

======================================================== 
Wayne Cunningham                 wcunning at thenet-usa.com 
Associate Editor                    slothrop at holonet.net 
415.696.1688 x169                      fax: 415.696.1678 
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