Dealing with the X factor

Dealing with the X factor
July 30, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/dealing-with-the-x-factor/2005/07/29/1122144004015.html

Douglas Coupland is still haunted by the extraordinary impact of his first book. Before his visit to Melbourne, he speaks to Ben Naparstek.

Douglas Coupland recently chewed up several of his novels with his molars. He then sculpted hornets' nests from the mush. For the Vancouver writer and visual artist, who feels closer to art society than the literati, the exercise made for an intellectually satisfying meal.

"For years I've been thinking, 'What is a book materially? When does the book stop being a book and become a sculpture? Or is a book a sculpture in itself?', " says the writer credited with introducing the term generation X into the popular lexicon with his 1991 novel of the same name.

Coupland fell into writing almost by accident, while living in Hawaii after graduating from art school. A magazine editor in Vancouver, amused by one of Coupland's postcards, asked him to write an article.

At first, journalism was merely a side gig to shore up his income as an artist. Then he began writing a regular comic strip, Generation X, for a corporate magazine. It attracted the attention of a New York publisher, who commissioned Coupland to write a lifestyle handbook for his age cohort.

Coupland produced a novel instead but the title, illustrations and vernacular glossary planned for the original non-fiction book remained. Published when Coupland was 29, Generation X portrays three disaffected 20-something "slackers" who withdraw to a desert bungalow in California. They shun the society controlled by rich baby boomers, hogging the spoils while consigning their offspring to low-paying "McJobs".

Coupland claimed, however innocently, that he only wanted to tell a story. Despite his protests that generation X referred to a particular mind-state rather than his generation, the book was hijacked by social anthropologists and advertising agencies, casting Coupland as the ring bearer of the prematurely jaded generation.

As Coupland reached rock star status, the inevitable false rumours started circulating; he was said to live in Scotland, store letters in a vault and collect meteorites. Thirteen books on, it's understandable that he should bridle at being asked about the X phenomenon. "Good God! It's 2005."

Yet, despite his attempts to distance himself from the spokesman-for-a-generation mantle, his novels continued to tap into the anxieties of post-baby boomers, while remaining pocked with up-to-the-minute schlock-culture references.

Coupland suffered a critical backlash with his next books, Shampoo Planet and Life after God, where he was seen as failing to move beyond the cool phrase-making, lists and aphorisms of his debut. "My 15 minutes of fame ended somewhere around 1993."

His image was rehabilitated with his 1995 novel Microserfs, a satire of computer programming apparatchiks that The New Statesman called "the first great work of cyber-realism".

Coupland's latest novel Eleanor Rigby is possibly his most autobiographical work. It is narrated by Liz Dunn, an overweight 42-year-old cubicle worker, who sleepwalks through life with no passions or aspirations, and lives alone without friends, lovers or pets.

The novel stems from the loneliness that dogged Coupland throughout his 20s. He thought he needed to swallow more Prozac. Only in retrospect did he identify his malaise as loneliness - an affliction without a drug cure. Coupland thinks that the Canadian high school curriculum should introduce a new subject: Loneliness 101.

"If they told us in school that there was this weird thing you were going to experience the moment you turn 20, that would have been a great service. It might be just a North American thing but you always have to smile for the camera and give it your best. Negative emotions, or inevitable emotions, never get discussed."

Coupland believes that most protagonists automatically become synonymous with the latest Hollywood pin-up in the reader's imagination. With the obese Liz, Coupland forecloses that possibility.

"We really do have these generic, interchangeable hero and heroine characters in our head. You have to work really, really hard to combat the tendency to default back to that generic narrator."

It occurred to Coupland, while working on Eleanor Rigby, that he was writing to his younger self.
"I used to operate under the belief that everyone has as good a chance as anyone else. Now, at a ridiculously late age, I realise that looks, family and education wildly skew people's lives. I figured out how and why the world works quite late in the game. I wish I hadn't been as clueless as I was."

As with his previous novel Hey Nostradamus!, there's an ambiguous religious undertow to Eleanor Rigby. Hey Nostradamus! was partly narrated by the ghost of a victim of a Columbine-style school shooting, whose body is found next to a binder on which she has scrawled: "God is nowhere/God is now here."

In Eleanor Rigby, the heroine's long-estranged, now terminally ill son, re-enters her life as a Christ-like figure to nudge her towards redemption. While he has apocalyptic visions of items dropping from the sky, there's never any question that they're illness-related hallucinations.
So is Coupland religious? "That's one of those questions where if you answer in the affirmative it means you're not. I like to think of myself as being religious, but it's something you really have to work at, or else you stop being it very quickly."

Coupland's trademark offhand prose, sitcom-like repartee and outlandish chance events remain in force in his last two books. Yet there's also a compassionate, moralistic voice that was absent from his earlier, surface-obsessed works. He shrugs off the suggestion that he has been gradually reaching for more spiritual themes, promising that his forthcoming novel, jPod, will turn that idea on its head. "I wanted to do something which is flat-out funny, that has no other scheme in mind."

Still, he struggles to recognise himself in the younger writer who said: "Writing that sets out to prove something isn't really writing - it's a kind of lobbying."

Coupland credits art, rather than literature, with influencing his style. "I approach the creation of words from a visual standpoint. The way I look at the literary world is that there's no modern art there.

"Quality is based on how well you draw a feather, as opposed to generating new forms. In the art world, popular culture, high culture, middlebrow culture, no culture - nature, science and mathematics - morphed together in the '60s. Thinking about where you can get ideas, and how you can use them, is the opposite of rigid."

He's an unapologetic connoisseur of plastic surgery makeover faux-reality television programs, joking that if Extreme Makeover and The Swan were submitted as art films to the Venice Biennale two decades ago, they would have won the Prix d'Or.

For his first five books, Coupland carried around notebooks, recording detailed observations that formed the basis of his novels. "I was putting myself through my own personal journalism school." This might account for why reviews of his early books sometimes characterised him as a jumped-up journalist, more interested in fad-spotting than character or plot. Eventually he realised that newspaper and magazine editors were mostly excerpting passages from novels
that he wrote spontaneously rather than from notes. He hasn't used notes since.

Coupland only recently started working with an editor. When he switched publishers for his 2000 novel Miss Wyoming, his new editor issued him a 15-page memorandum, criticising the manuscript for mawkishness. She even likened it to Patch Adams.

"When I read the old books, I think, 'For god's sake, why didn't anyone ever edit you?' If I was lucky, they got spellchecked. I'm not some sort of freakish exception. Editing has become about acquisition rather than editing."

Coupland rarely tours, but is looking forward to visiting Melbourne for the Writers' Festival because, he says, "everyone tells me it's almost identical to Vancouver". Coupland signs off his emails: "Cheers from the Other Melbourne." He did his last major publicity jaunt in 1995 - a three-month trip through Europe that triggered a severe breakdown. On return to Vancouver, he suffered what felt like an epileptic seizure. "I felt my DNA disintegrating. It was terrifying."

He spent the following year in what he likens to a waking coma, too crippled by depression and agoraphobia to write or leave his house. "There's only so much travel I can do before I become a madman, but I didn't know that then. Now I say no to practically everything."

Coupland is still stalked by the ghost of the washout he once feared he might become. "When you went to art school in Vancouver - the middle of nowhere back then - you made certain assumptions about the way your life was possibly going to go. If I'd ended up in a methadone clinic, I wouldn't have been surprised. I'm always aware of the spectre of what might have been."

Douglas Coupland will be a guest at next month's Age Melbourne Writers' Festival. Eleanor Rigby is published by HarperCollins.