Coupland's dual authorial personalities vie for supremacy like the black and white antagonists of "Spy vs. Now comes "Microserfs," a funny and stridently topical novel about computer nerds, in which Mr. His next books, the appropriately frothy novel "Shampoo Planet" and the story collection "Life After God," for all their tribal and demographic self-consciousness, revealed glimpses of a more conventional and sentimental writer than the generational avatar of the first one. Douglas Coupland, now 33, seemed to grab for the mantle with both hands when he decided to call his first novel "Generation X." It was an ambitious title for a smart, quirky book whose characters were far more idiosyncratic and articulate than the straw dudes we've come to know and loathe in the life style sections ever since. $21.īEING the literary spokesman for a generation is a dangerous job, and one that I would hesitate to recommend to those who plan to live past the age of 30. New York: Regan Books/ HarperCollins Publishers. What he is really trying to do is show you what life for the young, computer literate college-aged is like, where the world is your oyster, and you prefer pizza.MICROSERFS By Douglas Coupland. While Coupland captures the feeling for a certain segment early in the book, it is only a portion of what he’s casting his net for. This is not just for those people who wonder what life as a Microsoft employee is like. To finish it off with, Coupland here explains his concept of Lego as the ultimate geek toy, something he has elaborated on recently in Wired magazine. You can pull up almost any page and find enough brand name and object references to stun even the most jaded of computer nerds. I predict in the future people will use this as a nostalgic device at parties. The cultural references here are overwhelming. It also gets underneath the surface of high tech low-lifes (and I don’t mean the cyberpunks–these are the geeks, the ones who stare at a monitor all day and all night, who never have time to make the score as a Gibson character) to show that even they are still human. It praises geekdom, while also shining a blinding white light at the superficiality of this most materialistic culture. This book is a codification of that heady feeling. But as soon as I started it, from page 1, rather than the 50 pages it took me to get into the Thomson, I was hooked.Ĭoupland is the voice of our generation, whatever our generation is: the first group of people to work with computers.
It was also a AlexLit recommendation, I blanched at the length, it was an author unfamiliar to me.
I came at this one almost exactly the same way that I did with Amy Thomson’s The Color of Distance. Microserfs, Douglas Coupland, Regan Books (Harper Collins), 1995, ISBN 0-06-039148-0, 371pp.
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