Douglas Coupland is shocked people still read his breakout novel Generation X.
When Douglas Coupland moved to a rented bungalow in Palm Springs, Calif. to write the book that would become Generation X, he did so with little expectation of it ever connecting with a wider audience. The art school student turned non-fiction writer had been tasked with writing a field guide to the post-boomer sensibility at a time when few people believed that such a beast existed. When he turned in a novel about three listless youths spending their days in a rented bungalow telling each other stories, he had no way of knowing how it would be received.
“I used to be worried, starting with Generation X, that no one outside of a very, very tiny group of people I went to school with and grew up with would understand what I was talking about,” says Coupland. “That people related to it all over the world was a real shocker to me and still kind of is. The thing that shocks me now is that young people are still coming to it. It’s not limited just to the people who had my own particular set of experiences growing up. There’s something universal to it.”
In the 18 years since Generation X was published, Coupland has connected time and time again with his audience, publishing roughly one book a year and becoming a fixture on the Canadian cultural scene in the process. In addition to his works of fiction and non-fiction, he’s remained active as a visual artist, dabbled in television, film and theatre, and designed an eight-acre park in downtown Toronto.
With a diverse body of work behind him, it’s intriguing that his latest book so clearly evokes his first. Generation A, like its ancestor, explores the importance of reading and storytelling in an accelerated culture. When asked how his own approach to storytelling has changed in the 20 years since he sat down to write Generation X, he harkens back to the late 1980s.
“The thing about storytelling then versus now… there was the sensation, for me at least, and I think it was shared to some extent collectively, that the information universe was starting to get away from us,” he says. “I think that unconsciously, Generation X was a way of… going off and telling stories to try and make sense of the changing world.”
“Obviously in the last six or five years in particular, we’ve had these things that have just completely blown information out of the water,” he says. “It’s just so much going on so quickly and it seems to be speeding up even faster. So I thought to myself, ‘OK, what would someone, those same characters-ish, in today’s environment, what sort of stories would they tell and what would they reflect?’ And that was the sort of seed of it.”
Generation A approaches story through the voices of five characters united by a seemingly unrelated event. Separated by geography and culture, they find themselves simultaneously stung by bees in a world where bees are believed to be extinct. The fallout from this act finds the five so-called Wonka kids shipped to various research facilities, where they are poked, prodded and, strangely enough, encouraged to tell stories. In the course of telling these tales, deeper truths emerge, resulting in a startling revelation.
“Stories are a form of pattern recognition,” says Coupland. “In a very clinical and mathematical sense, if somebody tells a story, he’s just giving you a matrix of information that you can glean something from. If you have a bunch of people telling stories, wittingly or unwittingly, they are going to reveal patterns about what’s going on inside themselves and possibly civilization as a whole.”
Which leads to the obvious question: What patterns are revealed in the collected works of Douglas Coupland? One of the threads that he sees running through his oeuvre is the way that technology is changing our sense of who we are.
“That’s something that I’ve sort of… over the last 20 years, noticed in what I do, in sort of building up a language and a vocabulary and various ways of approaching it,” he says. “From sort of apocalyptic and theological in Girlfriend in a Coma, say, to sort of very, very light and frothy with Miss Wyoming, or, you know, genuinely dealing with crises of the soul with Hey Nostradamus. Part of me doing what I do is the art-school spirit of always experimenting with a new form, or taking some thread and pursuing it to some sort of logical end or illogical end.”
To hear the master storyteller in action, check out Coupland’s appearance October 17 at the Eric Harvey Theatre in Banff in conjunction with WordFest, or trek north of the city to Indigo Cross Iron Mills to chat with him while he signs your book on October 18.
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