MISS WYOMING
By Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland is a hip writer based in Vancouver with a following that
almost amounts to a cult. The "Lost" and "Reported missing"
messages that invariably come up when trying to find his books in a library
testify to his popularity among a segment of the population that he branded
Generation X. If you consider yourself to be an Xer, you may not want to read
any more of this review.
The end of the 20th century, much like the end of the 17th in England, has
been a great age of literary wit. Our most popular authors (excluding genre or
pulp) have been masters of light fictions with playful and inventive storylines
that emphasize dramatic elements (dialogue, plotting) over introspection. It is
a fiction of surfaces, offspring of a sensibility that frankly accepts, as one
of the characters in Miss Wyoming puts it, that movies are "the one
genuinely novel art form of the 20th century." The point, of course, is in
the pun: The only genuine novel is the screenplay that isn't.
The heart of this zeitgeist is Los Angeles, world capital of the
entertainment industry. The word entertainment is key. Separating entertainment
from art may be considered elitist by some, but I still think the effort has
some value. As Neal Gabler recently theorized, entertainment is best thought of
as mere stimulation, a kind of expression that avoids challenge and eschews
intellectual content. It is fast, fun, and perfectly disposable.
As much fun as Coupland's writing is, it has entertainment's smell of
disposability about it. Like most of the current hip generation of writers he
studs his prose with brand names: McDonald's, Blockbuster, Chrysler, Orange
Julius. The cultural references seem sharp today, but how will they play by the
time the book is in paperback? How many readers will "get" an allusion
that has someone "staring at the pavement, like Prince William following
his mother's coffin" then? For that matter, who remembers Generation X
today as anything other than a widely adopted demographic label? That book was
published almost 10 years ago, man.
Miss Wyoming is a novel about a movie producer, John, who falls in
love with a former child star, Susan. Both have gone through pre-mid-life crises
and failed attempts to start their lives anew. It is, of course, set in Los
Angeles. (Coupland, remember, is from Vancouver, but Vancouverites are so good
at imagining themselves living in Los Angeles they even build houses that fall
apart in the Canadian wet.) The physical - and I can't say natural - environment
looks like this:
It was a brainless sunny day, and the high noon flattened out the
world. The trees looked like plastic and the pedestrians like mannequins.
Patches of shade formed deep holes.
Really, what more is there to say? The day is brainless, the world is flat.
Any depth that we do see is only an illusion. The trees are plastic and so are
the people. This is a world of labels, where the transcendent reality is what is
presented on TV. Watching the news coverage of the air crash she has survived,
Susan reflects on how "the events on TV seemed more real to her than did
her actual experience." No doubt this is true. I only wish I had a nickel
for every time I've heard the same feeling expressed by other writers in the
last 20 years.
In a fiction where image is everything it is sometimes hard to see what the
author is really up to. It may be that the whole thing is a kind of joke (Coupland
is starting to look like Jeff Koons in his publicity photos), and it may be that
you're not supposed to think at all.
As brain candy the book works for a while, but loses its way pretty quickly
and concludes in a totally silly and unconvincing manner. Since the main
characters are both celebrities, they are almost impossible to relate to. There
are some sparks, such as when Susan tries to explain how the media is "all
lies" ("Everything you read. It's all just crap and lies and
distortion. All of it. Lies."), but even these aren't all that fresh. Most
of the time Coupland's ersatz spirituality and cultural critiques only come off
like a shrugged "whatever," the most recent rallying cry of cool.
As a final verdict on Miss Wyoming, I couldn't put it any better
myself.
Notes:
Review first published January 29, 2000.
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