You'll hate to love this...
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It was only a couple of years ago that I was sitting in the pub with a guy from my course at University discussing the merits of Coupland's breathtaking 'Generation X'. My drinking buddy had read it as part of his A-Level English course and we were discussing the merits of the book - "poignant", "existentialistic", "thought-provoking", "depressing", "moving". It was then that another drinking companion of ours stepped in and asked "So what exactly is the book about?". Inevitable silence fell. Coupland has the enviable ability to write about absolutely nothing, yet disguise it as a well-crafted story - look at "Generation X", look at "Life After God", then look at "Microserfs".
No matter how much you detest this book, how shallow or one-dimensional you feel the characters are, how little you feel the story actually develops, this is still an undeniably brilliant piece of literature. It is not the characters that give the book it's purpose - it is the ideas that are hidden within the prose. On reading this I embraced the randomness of the story - both by appreciating the way that the syntax is presented on the page and the idiosyncrasies of the characters. Without accepting this lack of coherance - you cannot appreciate what the story is REALLY about. The truth is, on reading this I got the impression that Coupland was using this book as an excuse to expound his personal philosophies - to raise the questions that he wanted to ask in his other novels but never quite found the opportunity.
For me, an avid Coupland fan, this book ended not on a sad note, but on a triumphant note. Throughout the course of the book, our "microserfs" struggle to really see any purpose in the job that they do - there seems to be no intrinsic value in what they achieve, only ever instrumental value. Yet at the end, when Dan's mother has her stroke and cannot communicate, technology, ironically, comes to their aid... there is light at the end of the tunnel.
For those of you who do not like this book, I doubt it's because you don't understand it... I suspect you dislike it because you understand it FAR TOO WELL
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Iused to lover her but i had to kill her....
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....ok i never used to love this book but def enjoyed it when i read it at uni... what happened? well nothing but on a reread ive realised that nothing happens, its not very convincing and that every paragraph is fair game for coupland to start lecturing on his various random thoughts.... i mean every conversation seems to be just an excuse for more ott analytical bs....the characters aren't very realistic- unless there really are whole groups of people who actually think like that or do the things they do..."someone was wearing gap so we spent the next hour discussing the merits of gap in a postindustrialized postmod-"......yawn, zzzzzz, yawn.... it remimded me a bit of gen x in that sense but i enjoyed gen x
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Vintage Coupland it isn't
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A solid book but I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed what with it being a Coupland book. His writng doesn't flow like it does in previous books like Shampoo Planet and Generation X. I also feel that there are too many main charecters and it is a little difficult to remind yourself who is who. That said, there is still a lot to enjoy from this novel. Coupland is still one of the wittiest writers alive today and he has a great take on relationships, jobs and life in general. Great observations, as always. It is worth buying this book if you liked his other stuff but it is not a classic, regrettably.
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Good but dated.
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I read this book a few years ago while working for another large corp with an even worse set of corporate values than Microsoft. I think a lot of the book tries to explore the mind-numbing but heavy handed discipline of the IT world. It also suggests the massive levels of exploitation of brilliance, coupled with the obvious burn-out for their rewards. Where the book is weakest is that it predated the tech sector meltdown and so the perceived reward of the old days - the vested options, read like something from another world. However, I liked the characters, and I found the way in which Coupland engages his characters to use their own talents great. I think this was the whole point of the book - that modern corporations take away ownership of end products and subsume individual identities mercilessly.
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Love The Writer, Dislike The Book
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Before I start this, I just want to say that Douglas Coupland is my favourite writer of recent years. "Girlfriend In A Coma" is near enough my favourite book ever written, while "Hey Nostradamus", "Life After God" and "Miss Wyoming" are also books I rate highly. Most of his other work is also well worth reading. It is extremely rare that I get past the first couple of chapters of a book and then don't bother to finish it. In fact, the only other examples that immediately spring to mind "The Hunchback Of Notre Dame" and "American Psycho". It is probably telling that I didn't find either of those books (or this) dreadful in any way, but found that they were so over-detailed in their descriptions that I just couldn't get into them. In this sense, these books are a useful point of refence. Like American Psycho, "Microserfs" is probably an incredibly accurate picture of what goes on in the head of the characters. Unfortunately, I felt that this resulted in a well-written but dull book documenting mundane activities in an unspectacular fashion. I'm not saying this is a terrible book. I maintain that Coupland is a terrific writer who everbody should try to read and obviously several people have praised the book so it must really connect with some people. But I didn't enjoy this. Maybe it's because I've no interest computer programming, maybe it's because the book is too accurate so as to be mundane, maybe it could even be that the in-jokes are lost in translation from the US and Canada (I forget in which one this was set) to British culture. I'll repeat again that, stylistically, "American Psycho" is a good reference point. If you read it were fascinated and blown away by the attention to detail, buy this book and you may love it. If you thought Brett Easton Ellis' book was probably very accurate but also extremely dull, I still suggest you read Douglas Coupland but try his other work instead.
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