Generation A
A Canadian literary icon unveils his latest work at BC Scene
Coupland: "In my case, words and objects become interchangeable"
“You know, you’re actually the first interviewer I’ve ever spoken to about Generation A.” It’s helplessly vain, but I can’t help but be thrilled hearing Douglas Coupland say these words. As part of his BC Scene appearance in Ottawa, Coupland plans to read from his as-yet-unpublished novel Generation A, a work that reflects back upon his seminal 1991 novel, Generation X, while expanding on it. “The book goes in a direction that I’ve never seen a book go before, so I guess that makes it experimental, which is a word that publishers hate.”
“In Generation A the characters are marshalled into a Decameronian situation and then try to make sense of their lives, and the events that brought them there.” Coupland’s last two works, The Gum Thief and jPod, although similar in dry, dark humour and in an exploration of forms of modern alienation, were widely disparate in structure and theme. His new work seems to follow this desire for the new, musing on “the way we tell short stories, how we tell them, an examination of the voice in your head. It’s very influenced by my late reading of Marshall.”
“Marshall” is Marshall McLuhan, whose upcoming biography Coupland has been engaged to write for Penguin’s Distinguished Canadians series of historical books. I can imagine no biographer more intriguing or compelling, not in the least because of his peculiar similarities with his subject: “I have a condition called synesthesia which [I believe I share with McLuhan]. In my
case, words and objects become interchangeable.”
Coupland’s novels can be described as grounded in the present of our modern, digital world, his themes usually drawn from a small band of contemporary life and media that stretches back maybe 20 years. Generation A marks Coupland’s first move past the fresh present to a near-future world: “There is a freedom that you get from writing in the near-future. With that freedom there’s always the pressure to degenerate into laziness. You can easily open up the gate and unleash your negative persona. But at the same time you don’t want to let out your inner Pollyanna.”
He speaks engagingly about these challenges, seeming to turn them over with the very words of his conversation, considering them. “In dystopian or utopian fiction, if you don’t like something, you have the option of destroying it, or getting rid of it. With near-future writing, the world is too close to significantly change.”
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Apr. 23, 2009
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=17139
