Agent Palmer

Reflecting “an early 1990s worldview that seems time-expired” Douglas Coupland mixes fact with fiction within the three parts of Polaroids from the Dead to make up what is now, two decades on from its initial release, a thought-provoking time capsule well worth your time.

The back cover of Douglas Coupland’s Life After God is pretty hard to not use as a description of what the book is. “We are the first generation raised without God. We are creatures with strong religious impulses, yet they have nowhere to flow in this world of malls and TV, Kraft dinners and jets. How do we cope with loneliness? Anxiety? The collapse of relationships?

Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland is another book which moves him up the list of my favorite authors. Not quite a direct follow up to Generation X, and not quite a bridge to Microserfs, but it also kind of is.

I have a confession to make. When I took my first crack at Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, I didn’t get very far.

It was a suggested read from a friend, so I bought it. I read 35 pages and then, for some reason, never finished the book. Fast forward to this year: I read Microserfs, also by Douglas Coupland, and ended up falling in love with his writing style.

Microserfs is a novel by Douglas Coupland published in 1995 that is extremely poignant and was ahead of its time. It is also an intimate glimpse into the nerd/geek mind the likes of which I’ve only experienced in my own head.