…sometimes I wonder if it is too late to feel the same things that other people seem to be feeling. Sometimes I want to go up to people and say to them, “What is it you are feeling that I am not? Please – that’s all I want to know” (311).
When I was in my early twenties, I thought this author was the best. Generation X changed the way I thought about pretty much everything. This book changed my lenses; it changed my vocabulary. My early-twenties state of mind was shaken and flipped upside down, which I think is exactly what I needed. My interests in questioning and observing - in what would later become writing and anthropology and poetry - surged and quietly roared inside of me. I hadn’t felt like that since Harriet the Spy in grade three.
But when I read Shampoo Planet, I was already losing my imagined connection with Coupland. I couldn’t relate to the characters; I certainly couldn’t relate to all those specific pop-culture references. I may have originally felt some form of kinship with the close-knit community of storytelling, social-critiquing, underemployed characters of the first book, I don’t know. But by the time I got to Microserfs there was almost nothing. No connection. When the friends who had originally introduced me to Coupland seemed to be just as excited as ever about Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming and so on, that only made it worse.
I have a confession to make. This was – what? Ten years ago? I bought a copy of Life After God from the Chapters bookstore in Orchard Park Mall in Kelowna, British Columbia, took it across the parking lot to the coffee shop, finished it in one sitting, and returned it for a refund that same afternoon. That’s how I was feeling about Douglas Coupland.
I started to think he was just writing the same book over and over again. I began to criticize him, for example I wondered why he would insist on always telling his readers that he was born on a Canadian NATO base in Germany? I started to think Douglas Coupland was a bit of a wanker, just riding the wave of earlier successes with nothing more than old material hidden under new veneers of hipness. (I still think pop-culture references are a bit of a cop-out.)
I recently borrowed a copy of Life After God. Just out of curiosity. Just for old times’ sake. Who knows? But I read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it. No, it was more than simple enjoyment: it actually really impacted me. It knocked the wind out of me. I could feel it. Reading it this time almost hurt. It spoke to me, just like Generation X had more than a decade earlier.
As long as there is wilderness, I know there is a larger part of myself that I can always visit, vast tracts of territory lying dormant, craving exploration and providing sanctity (344).
I’d like to apologize to Mr. Coupland. Two times I’ve read this book now, and he hasn’t made one red cent from me! (Apologize, too, for some of the nasty things I’ve said.) And I’d like to thank him. Maybe I was just too young when I read this book the first time. It didn’t mean much to me. I hadn’t lived enough, maybe, at that point. I guess I’ve lived a little more, now. I’d like to thank him for this simple, sad, and beautiful book.
Here is a Coupland-related website, and another. Articles, reviews, and so on.
Coupland, Douglas. Life After God. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
