Player One, By Douglas Coupland
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Your support makes all the difference.Fans of Douglas Coupland know what we can expect from his novels: social misfits thrown together in apocalyptic isolation; the fetishisation of storytelling; quirky meditations on time and human life; and an ease with the language of modernity that contemporary Great North American Novelists should envy. (That's you, Jonathan Franzen.)
Player One continues the inexorable drive into the Couplandesque, with a beautiful autistic woman, a disillusioned preacher, an airport bar and an oil crisis all contributing nicely to the oppressive present tense-ism of his weird world view, but the author has not just fed a list of characters and places into a random Coupland generator. Instead, his Eeyorish pessimism, left-field humour and admirable ability to enunciate all of our half-formed thoughts raise this from a sterile dissertation on why modern life is rubbish into the realms of really great fiction.
Briefly: Karen has flown to the Toronto Airport Camelot Hotel cocktail lounge to meet Warren, an internet date. Rachel has come to find a "neurotypical" alpha male with whom to breed in order to prove to her father that she is human. Luke has stolen $20,000 from his church after losing his faith. They happen to be in Rick's bar (Rick is a recovering alcoholic), there's an oil price-based apocalypse and toxic dust and someone is shot – but the important thing is their stories. "Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time," says Karen. "Our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events – a story – and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow."
The titular Player One is the only duff note: a computerised omniscient narrator who ties up the themes of time and narrative a bit too neatly. More effective is a slightly self-indulgent (but he's earnt it) postscript, a sort of glossary of neologisms such as alone-ism, godseeking and "pseudoalienation: the inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations". I'd like to see a whole book of these. Including, under C, "Couplandism".
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