Loneliness Virus

Christian Century, Nov 8, 2000 by J. Brent Bill

Douglas Coupland's World

ALL THE LONELY people, where do they all come from? That question from "Eleanor Rigby" might serve as the epigraph for the works of Douglas Coupland. Coupland is the Canadian writer who burst on the scene in 1991 with Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thereby coining the term for his generation. His books have been translated 22 languages and have sold more than a million copies in the U.S. alone.

Some reviewers called Generation X "a modern-day Catcher in the Rye," and a "field guide" to 20-somethings. It offered up an array of terms that by themselves constitute a social and spiritual critique of our age: "McJobs," "divorce assumption," "yuppie wannabes" and "meism." The novel follows the mundane fortunes of Andy, Claire and Dag, who quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in order to search for something more significant. They are lonely people looking for meaning in a lonely world--the kind of characters that appear again and again in Coupland's books.

Coupland followed Generation X with Shampoo Planet (1992), which is about Tyler Johnson, a 20-year-old whose "memories begin with Ronald Reagan" and who is struggling with life in corporate America. Then came Life After Cod (1995), an account of spiritual yearning in a postreligious age. His next book, Microserfs (1996), set on a Microsoft corporate campus, chronicles Dan Underwood's search for something beyond "Windowsworld." As a "microserf," Underwood is one of the indentured servants of the technological age. "Just think about the way high-tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s," says one programmer. "And the way tech firms won't even call work `the office,' but instead, `the campus.' It's sick and evil."

A similar sickness pervades the world of pop culture, which is the subject of Polaroids from the Dead (1997). Coupland presents a society obsessed with stardom and death. Loosely organized around the Grateful Dead and "Deadhead" culture, this collection includes meditations on Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Nicole Brown Simpson and Madonna.

In Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), high school senior Karen loses consciousness for two decades and seems to find sleep a satisfying resolution of life's difficulties. While she sleeps, the narrator and his friends morph from debauched Vancouver teens into somewhat responsible oldsters. When Karen awakes, she finds her loneliness unassuaged.

For his most recent novel, Miss Wyoming, Coupland switched publishing houses and editors, hoping to "get better and deeper." The book is certainly more conventional. Gone are the fragmentary chapters, quirky punctuation, Thurberesque line drawings, Lichtenstein-like pop art and weird formatting that captured attention in his earlier books. Miss Wyoming has plot development, complex characters, full-length chapters, punctuation and other trappings of respectable fiction. It's a grown-up novel, though without some of the quirkiness it also lacks some of the freshness of his other works.

Miss Wyoming features Susan Colgate, a former child beauty pageant participant and television sitcom star who finds herself the sole survivor of a plane crash. Colgate meets John Johnson, a debauched, disillusioned movie producer who has given away 'all his possessions to start a new life. Both attempt to reinvent themselves, an effort that leads Coupland to some of his strongest articulations of the loneliness theme.

John, worried that his blood carries "microscopic loneliness viruses," longs for "someone to discuss rugs and raccoons with." He feels "intact but worthless."

For Susan and John, "loneliness and the open discussion of loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.... Loneliness is smothering ... it stank et hopelessness."

The effort to escape loneliness leads Coupland's characters to drug use, casual sex or a preoccupation with work. As the narrator says in Life After God, people "put up with halfway relationships so as not to have to worry about loneliness."

As isolated as his characters are, they are typically love-phobic as well--afraid to extend themselves and be hurt. "Do you think," asks Vanessa, one of the characters in Miss Wyoming, "that I'm capable of--"

   "Of what?" says Johnson.

   "This is so embarrassing. Okay, I'll say it: of being loved." Vanessa
   looked as if she'd suddenly discovered she was naked in public.

Johnson tries to assure her that she is lovable, but tells her that she has to expose her heart "to the open air, let it get sunburned." Vanessa responds: "I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they'll borrow your heart and forget to return it to you."

This explicit longing for connection and community sometimes is realized in Coupland's novels, if only briefly, through unexpected connections with people or encounters with beauty. At the end of Generation X, the narrator is attacked by a hungry "cocaine white egret" and says, "Such was the moment's beauty that I essentially forgot I had been cut."