3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favours when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a serious of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Sycaruse University commencement address, May 8 1994, quoted at the beginning of Generation A, Douglas Coupland, William Heinemann 2009

John Self’s description of himself as ‘addicted to the twentieth century’ could easily have been applied to Douglas Coupland. Even starting out as a novelist in the mid nineties, his books bristled with logos and brandnames; and he’s in his element at a time when consumer technology is accelerating at an almost science-fiction pace. The novels are an alphabet soup of IPod, GPS, blog, vlog, ADD, YouTube, IKEA, BBDO. Characters speak in terms of old advertisements and TV shows and viral emails. With these continuous television and corporate reference points Coupland is ahead of his time. Think of how much of our conversation is recycled: imitations of old movie stars, radio-ad jingles, catchphrases from Simpsons and Peep Show…

Coupland’s attitude to his subject is ambivalent: neither Luddite denunciation nor wide-eyed, slack-jawed futurism. He’s argued at one point that branding and marketing have colonised our memory and reality. At other times he’s portrayed such technologies as nothing more than another form of human communication. The ambiguity makes for a special reading experience. At his best - Life After God, Polaroids from the Dead - Coupland can make you feel like everything you know is being stripped away, layer on layer. He reduces you to your constituent atoms. I met Coupland at a book signing in Manchester when I was sixteen or so and I remember thinking, Christ, that man has been touched by infinity. There’s a character from Girlfriend in a Coma who is blinded by a glimpse of heaven. Linus, feeling his way around while his sight gradually returns, reminded me of Coupland the person as I saw him that night in the Northern Quarter.

For someone so in love with the digital age, Coupland writes a great deal about the oral tradition - people sitting around a campfire telling stories. That was more or less the basis for Generation X, his first novel. Microserfs introduced us to a group of disenchanted Silicon Valley drones who set up their own games company. Systematically Coupland teased out and resolved their individual neuroses through group discussion.

Generation A returns to the campfire. It’s set in the future, but Coupland’s realism sees to it that nothing much has changed except that there are some crop shortages and bees have gone extinct. Or that’s what everyone thought, until five young people - a French arcade nihilist, a Sri Lankan call centre worker, an Iowan farmer - are stung. Tellingly, they are all using communications technology at the time, chatting on laptops and mobiles. Governments swoop and incarcerate them in a quarantine centre stripped of all branded products. There they are instructed to make up stories.

The novel’s funniest scene comes when Zack, the farm labourer, is stung by a ‘rogue’ bee. At the time he’s naked in a combine harvester, talking to a friend through portable plasma while shearing his uncle’s cornfield into a gigantic representation of the cock and balls, so avidly does he despise the agribusiness tycoons of his home state. Apart from this, though, Coupland doesn’t really do character. His books are populated by ciphers, zeroes, disembodied souls. You couldn’t describe what a Coupland character looks like. Come to think of it, there is so little physicality of any kind: Generation A has helicopter rides, air disasters and kidnappings but they are rendered with such indifference that the reader could blink and miss them.

And yet everything changes when the characters open their mouths. Coupland’s dialogue is so riveting, moving and right on the money in terms of how people actually talk that all else is forgotten. He’s like a gambler who puts all his chips on a single roulette number - and wins every time. The characters are merely vessels for their stories, and the stories themselves are wonderful contemporary fairytales, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury or Joe Meno.

Generation A is propelled by true artistic ambition. Coupland is attempting to get down to the real drive of human communication. The twitching root of everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals including Open Wide, Straight from the Fridge and Lamport Court. He also writes articles on politics and religion for Butterflies and Wheels. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He is reviews editor of 3:AM and blogs here.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, October 20th, 2009.