Danhon's Full Review: Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming
About five years ago, I snuck into a Waterstones in Liverpool, headed straight for the new hardback fiction section, picked up Coupland's Microserfs, handed over ten pounds and finished its three hundred and seventy-odd pages at about two in the morning.
I was gripped. Microserfs began as a short story in a computer magazine that I'd read, and Coupland had decided to expand the story of geek coders into a full-length novel. With Generation X, Coupland introduced us to the twenty-something slackers, by the time Microserfs had been published, the Gap-clones were ready to take over the world.
Miss Wyoming is different. It's still definitive Coupland, you can tell quite easily from the mannerisms of the characters, his writing style hasn't really changed since Microserfs, but having not read Girlfriend in a Coma, there's a gaping hole in my collection of his fiction.
Simply, Miss Wyoming is a love story. You know that Susan and John, the main protagonists, are going to get together. It's painfully obvious. You just don't know how it's going to happen. Paying scant regard to the flow of time, Coupland jumps around, filling in the character's lives not through the use of past tense but actually catapulting us back in their lives. We live through Susan's post-plane crash soul searching journey at the same times as living through John's preoccupation with becoming a hobo, but Coupland runs together the three strands of the present and two separate-yet-vaguely similar pasts expertly.
Coupland's main essence shows through in Vanessa, a mid-way addition to the novel with an astronomical IQ, a big fat brain who works for the RAND corporation. She throws in the obligatory technical tidbit to keep gadget freaks happy.
In some ways, it was easy for me to identify with the characters in Microserfs. I felt closer to them than John and Susan in Miss Wyoming, but I suspect that's because John and Susan are in their late thirties, which is way out of my ambit of experience.
Okay. It was a good read. A little hard to get stuck into in the beginning, but once Coupland had actually worked out what the plot was going to be, which occurs about halfway through the novel after he's more or less vaguely introduced the main characters. Of course, once the plot starts moving, everything accelerates and Coupland ends up having to introduce a few more characters and pin down Susan's elusive mom.
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