Resting on His Self-Perceived Laurels, That's What

Posted on August 27, 2009 by Phoebe 117No Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2009%2F08%2F27%2Fresting-on-his-self-perceived-laurels-thats-what%2FResting+on+His+Self-Perceived+Laurels%2C+That%26%23039%3Bs+What2009-08-27+13%3A56%3A00Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fphoebeeating.dreamhosters.com%2F%3Fp%3D117

I hadn’t heard of Douglas Coupland’s upcoming Generation A before, but now that I have, I can’t help but say, Doug, what are you doing?

Because it feels relevant, I’m pasting a review I wrote in 2007 of Coupland’s similar 2007 venture, his “Microserfs for the iPod generation”, JPod. Warning: it’s long.

It seems to be a generally accepted truism that writers are a self-absorbed lot; like all artists, they are characterized as insular and reflective, looking inward rather than to the external world for stimulation and inspiration. Some writers refuse to acknowledge this caricature, taking for granted the way that their creative scrutiny affects their image of the world. Others, from James Joyce to Kurt Vonnegut, only tersely accede to the novelist’s clichéd vanity by presenting highly fictionalized, parodied, and renamed doppelgangers of themselves within their works. But two contemporary popular authors take this Joycean self-interest a step further in their most recent novels, making themselves central and integral characters. Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis are not, of course, the first writers to do this—Dante played a similar game in his Divine Comedies well before Patrick Bateman was a glimmer in Ellis’ great grand-daddy’s eye—but they are undoubtedly taking a greater risk in writing fiction about themselves than Alighieri ever did, as not only are their artistic visions at stake but also their statuses with their respective substantial and vocal fan bases, audiences weaned on their earlier, extremely idiosyncratic works.

But perhaps it is because of their long-standing and earned reputations, rather than in spite of them, that each author–Ellis in Lunar Park and Coupland in Jpod–is able to make this gamble, as both novels are as wholly dependent on the reader’s preconceived ideas about the writer himself as they are on style or storytelling. In their self-reference, both novelists seem to be reacting to the public perception of themselves and their writing, but with far differing effects—Coupland’s book reads as an eyebrow waggling parody of both his earlier works and his young-and-irreverent-at-heart audience, while Ellis’ novel, though flawed, is an engaging and possibly transcendent piece of literature about the effect a writer’s creations have on himself.

Both novels open with dialogue meant to warn us as to their subsequent self-referential nature. In Jpod, a character whines, “I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel,” while in Lunar Park, Ellis’ fictional wife asserts that “You do an awfully good impression of yourself.” But the similarities quickly and neatly end there; Coupland has his Jpoders mull, aimlessly and seemingly purposelessly, on their shared hatred for their creator, while Ellis launches into an extended—and surprisingly relevant–examination of the openings of his other works, expressing an honest desire to get back to frank, effective writing, before returning to his frank, effective plot. Almost immediately it starts to feel as if Coupland is playing a joke on us—he’s sure he knows exactly what we think of him and intends to prove us right, if only to highlight our own frivolities and weaknesses. Meanwhile, Ellis is humbly undressing himself to his readers, showing himself to be human rather than the parody we assume. Like Coupland, he is acutely self-aware of his image, but he uses that image as a basis for self-reflection rather than self-indulgence.

Coupland, at least, is aware of how much of his novel is dependent on his earlier works and fame. Jpod’s stylistic, surface similarities to his pre-millennial writing are trumpeted on the jacket text and on the novel’s marketing website. It’s heralded as “Microserfs 2.0” and indeed, in form the two appear similar—both are supposedly the computer diaries of twenty-something men working for technology companies, both are peppered with au courant pop-culture references and avant-garde typesetting choices. But when it comes to plot, the two books are very, very different. Microserfs was a story about young people idling in unfulfilling jobs only initially; ultimately, the characters went on to form deeper, more meaningful relationships with one another as well as with their work. They were self-motivated despite their fascination with all things that seemed, at the time, hip, pop, and young (legos, individually wrapped kraft cheese slices, the internet). Meanwhile, Jpod’s cast idles and continues to idle until the deux ex machina—in the form of Coupland himself, of course–intervenes conveniently near the conclusion of the novel. These nuserfs are immensely concerned with nearly the same chatter and white noise as the older characters, but they use searching for a fake three-letter word on a list of all the three-letter words in Scrabble as a way to divert themselves not only from purposeful work, but greater purpose as well. When potentially emotional events happen within Jpod’s pages—the burial of someone killed by the narrator’s mother, drug use, the incipience of relationships—they’re all recounted in an almost tangential and certainly vacuous way and then immediately dismissed. It’s not that the Jpoders care about frivolous things, but that they care only about frivolous things; they’re wholly satisfied with lives composed of static, whereas the microserfs sought a clearer, more meaningful image in the face of overwhelming irrelevance.

And the purpose of Coupland’s presence in Jpod’s narrative seems to be to vocalize these flaws in the lives of our supposed protagonists. Some reviews have characterized the fictional Coupland as “evil” or “mean-spirited,” but while he’s openly critical about the Jpoders it’s not as if anything he says about them is untrue. He does openly admit that they’re fun people, but also correctly accuses them of leading extremely vacant and emotionally empty lives. While reading Coupland’s monologue, I couldn’t help but think that he was addressing both members of my own generation, generally, and more specifically those twenty-something readers attracted to the quirky and idiosyncratic format of Generation X and Microserfs. Undoubtedly, the modern, post-college crowd largely lives lives devoid of meaning and often engages in conversations and tasks designed to distract ourselves from this lack of deeper purpose. While many of us may have been drawn to Coupland’s older books for their cool, weird trappings, we may have missed the deeper and more important themes the author was trying to express (and, in fact, we probably didn’t even bother reading his later, more conventional novels—returning to Coupland only when his books bore the words “Microserfs for the Google generation!” on the cover). Fictional Douglas seems to be present to critique us for this superficiality. And though this message was effectively communicated, and while reading Jpod was, occasionally, a “fun” experience, it left me feeling ultimately emptier than before. Beyond serving as a lecture to his young readership, it was as vacuous an experience as the lives of the Jpoders themselves, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the true punch line to Coupland’s joke was that he managed to fool unsuspecting fans into buying the novel through comparisons to his older, much deeper work.

Perhaps it is telling, then, that Lunar Park divorces itself from Ellis’ previous novels in its presentation and marketing. Before starting the novel, I was unaware of the connection between it and Ellis’ older body of work; it is marketed instead as a horror story and a reflection on the relationship between fathers and sons. Yet its connection to Ellis’ previous novels—as well as everything he’s ever written since childhood—is both deep and paramount. While it doesn’t assume that the reader has read American Psycho or Less than Zero, the fact that Ellis wrote these works are key plo
t points and integral to the development of “Bret” as a character.

In Lunar Park, Ellis himself narrates the story of his life after his rampant and rapid rise to fame. After a prolonged adolescence spent on heavy drug use, celebrity, and casual sex, he tries to force himself to settle down in a domestic world with the mother of his (once) illegitimate son, Robby. Though initially it is Ellis himself who threatens his home life through the infidelity and intoxication that both he and his books are infamous for, eventually—and surreally—his rather terrible literary creations manifest themselves in the actual world, forcing him into the role of protector and father that he had so long avoided. Ellis makes some interesting and not-always effective choices within the novel—for example, he portrays himself as a writer who doesn’t really know how to write, and passages describing a little girl looking like a “parody of a child” feel weirdly contrasted with the better written and more naturalistic sections of the book—but the end result of his self-reference is effective, both strong and strongly felt. Whereas Coupland’s presence in Jpod served to lecture his readers on their own faults, Ellis’ intention in including himself as a narrator seems infinitely more humble. Rather than attempting to correct the assumptions of his readers, he capitalizes on those assumptions in order to both build an effective story as well as to explore some rather interesting, and fairly universal themes. While his characterization of himself is exaggerated and fictionalized (and, in fact, the nuclear family that the novel revolves around is entirely fictional), it enables him to examine the impact of living a playboy’s life on the family unit, to explore the grief of a child after the loss of a parent, as well as to ultimately reveal the paternal relationship that a writer has with his or her creations.

In the case of both Jpod and Lunar Park, the presence of the writer within the story is absolutely necessary for the story to exist. Yet while I have no doubt that Ellis’ story ultimately should exist, I feel far more skeptical when examining the worth of Coupland’s Jpod. Unlike Lunar Park, which is both a dynamic story and a deeper exploration of human emotions, Jpod merely felt like an exercise in self-indulgence, its author bent on schooling the audience on their own foibles which he presumes himself absent of. While I do not deny that many writers cannot help but writing in a way that is self-reflective, I can’t help but wonder if Douglas Coupland would have been better off had he avoiding being self-referential.