peteg's blog - noise - books - 2013 04 21 Coupland GenerationA

Douglas Coupland: Generation A

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I recall reading Generation X when I was in Melbourne in 2002, and Microserfs at some point. (It seems I did read more of Coupland's output but that stuff left little mark.) This is unfortunately a long way from those. Here Coupland is often embarrassed by his own characters: regularly a risible cliché is harried by I-take-that-back; let me make a ludicrous assertion, no, cancel that — what I really meant was something even more banal. That Solon thing, I don't get it, I don't know what the bees have to do with anything, and all that rear-loaded exposition cannot redeem this turkey from those feeble, tiresome embedded short stories! The back blurb by William Gibson tells me I should be reading Murakami instead, so I just ordered the two that Kate suggested.

For some reason the UNSW Library thought this was worthy of purchase circa 2010.