by Douglas Coupland
ISBN: 1582342156
This book is the literary equivalent of comfort food. For me, that means a perfectly golden-brown grilled cheese sandwich with a side of greasy diner fries.
And that is why I read Coupland — you know, that hip GenX novel writer who is now being positioned as a hip, actually adult novel writer — to relax, to enjoy, to give my brain a treat. This is probably why I reread Microserfs once a year.
I’ve never been a big admirer of the “he captures the zeitgeist” school of thinking about Coupland. His stories are a bit weird, he can be a bit lazy (meaning: things in his books can be too easy, verging on pat) and he has a knack for writing characters I don’t think I’m supposed to like, certainly I wouldn’t like if I met them as people, yet in the context of the book, I like them.
This book is more mature than his others (Girlfriend in a Coma reminded me of nothing so much as a Smiths song, though not the one it shares a title with) in that the random events and mental wanderings chronicled happen to adults, instead of folks on the verge of adulthood. The people are real, in their curious unreal-Coupland-like way.
This novel is about the Drummonds, and their assorted freaky misadventures. They are a capital D Dysfunctional family: there’s Mom, Dad, Dad’s trophy wife, the now-married eldest brother who slept with said trophy wife, middle sister NASA astronaut with one hand thanks to thalidomide, the youngest mullet-headed suicidal sibling and the woman he’s knocked up, and a variety of shady characters, scrubbed space-lovers, and fellow-travelers. Half the family has AIDs. Throw in some clever observations, earnest feelings, stylistic quirks and you’ve got a tasty meal.
