Kevin Geeks Out About: Douglas Coupland

For the most part this blog is a display-case for my little obsessions and observations.  This entry might not fit the usual profile, but it has to do with a writer I really like and will continue to read until one of us dies.

In Herman Raucher's novel Summer of '42 the main character's high school English teacher advises him to read the complete works of one author.  I have ended up doing that with novelist Douglas Coupland, who famously wrote Generation X.  He's a powerful writer and I've come to really love his books.  I was more moved than I should've been when a character in Microserfs referenced the way the roof of your mouth becomes raw when you eat too much Cap'n Crunch.  Coupland always combines an attention to pop-culture details with thoughtful ideas about the passage of time, our sense of identity, loneliness and depression.  He speaks to me.

One of my favorite passages appears in Coupland's third book, a collection of stories titled Life After God.  In "Things that Fly"the narrator struggles with a bad break-up and reflects upon the death of Superman and a profound sense of loneliness. I transcribed this next passage and put it into a hand-made greeting card that I gave to my girl-friend, after we broke up and then got back together.  So this passage has always stuck with me:

And then I got just plain lonely and just so fed up the badness in my life and in the world and I said to myself "Please, God, just make me a bird -- that's all I ever really wanted -- a white graceful bird free of shame and taint and fear and loneliness, and give me other white birds among which to fly and give me a sky so big that if I never wanted to land I would never have to." 

But instead, God gave me these words, and I speak them here. 

(Douglas Coupland, "Things that Fly", Life After God page 88, 1994)