Coupland's Mainstream Book
I'm a fan of Douglas Coupland. His Girlfriend in a Coma (besides being the title of one of my favorite Smiths songs) was such a wonderful look at the self-importance of teenagers (well, that's how I take it now, a long way past the new millennium the book foretold), and I read most of his other books in short succession after Girlfriend. For some reason, though, I never picked up Miss Wyoming until this week.
Miss Wyoming is about Susan Colgate, a woman who, after spending her entire childhood on the pageant circuit, becomes an actress. Then, on her way back from an interview in New York, her plane crashes in the middle of the country. She walks away unharmed, and lives out the next year with the entire world thinking that she's dead.
After she gets back to LA, she meets John Johnson (alright, Coupland got all the names for his characters in this one from looking around his bathroom), a movie producer who decided to just walk away from his life -- literally. He spent a few months living as a nobody, and has just started returning to his life.
The plot doesn't progress this way, of course. There's a lot of jumping around in time and space, but, as with most of Coupland's work, it all flows together. Perhaps most surprising is how mainstream this book is -- more than a love story and a mystery, it's also a long rumination on the cult of celebrity. Somehow, that makes it more satisfying than most of Coupland's books -- by attacking the problems of more than just Gen X, he somehow also acknowledges that maybe we're not all slackers.
