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Wednesday, April 19, 1995
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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BOOK REVIEW
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Writer deletes early promise in "Microserfs"
By Mark Luce
Kansan staff writer
On its slippery surface, "Microserfs," Douglas Couland's fourth novel, appears to be the doppleginger of his first book "Generation X."
Rather than shiftless twenty somethings working McJobs and ironically critiquing the plastic culture of Palm Springs, Couland gives readers a handful of determined and driven twenty something hipster geeks who populate the computer industry's high-tech world.
Even though the venues and characters have changed, Coupland's themes and the conclusions he draws have staved the same.
In place of the definitions that littered the margins of "Generation X," Coupland's first-person narrator, Dan Underwood, gives the reader his subconscious musings every 15 to 20 pages. They are sets of randomly placed terms, products that range from Buck Rogers to Intel processors to Prozac.
"Microserfs" revolves around a handful of characters who disillusioned with the corporate sterility of Microsoft, break out on their own and develop "Oop!" It is a computer game akin to cyberspace LEGos with applications ranging from physiology to architecture.
Idiosyncrasy and eccentricity are
the staples of these self-proclaimed geeks as they move through the Silicon Valley's capitalist world with hypersensitivity, hyperirony and hypersmarts.
Coupland's trademark happiness is in full force.
Characters deliver soliloquies on everything from the decadent values of Trix! cereal —
However savvy the players, they cannot save Couland's uneven narrative. Like all of his other novels, he simply tries to do too much.
"Well-meaning rabbit, Trix," kept in continual state of malnutrition/subservience by dominant children of the parasitic bourgeoisise." — to the
post-feminist implications of the Barbie aisle at Toys-R-Us.
He wants to address questions of
exists.
technology and the body, and through the well-developed character of Karla, he does broach important issues. He offers three post-modern love stories; tackles a family dealing with a long-dead sibling and a mother's stroke; delineates the machinations of the post-industrial world; and debates whether history still
into a world haunted by the ghost of giant conglomerates, banal cultural artifacts and the Gap. When runnaming on such issues, Couland is at his best. His form is playful, sardonic and hilariously insightful.
Coupland, though, wants it both ways. He plays the disillusionment and irony cards and pulls the reader
He wrote:
But when he delves into the relationships and questions of identity, Coupland severely undercuts his cultural critique with redemptive romanticism.
"And then I thought about us ... these children who fell down life's cartoon holes ... dreamless children, alive but not living — we emerged on the other side of the cartoon holes fully awake and discovered we were whole."
A sentence, though, can't make these people nor the milieu which they inhabit whole. In an increasingly fragmented, temporarily and spatially compressed world, the notion of identity completion is fleeting at best.
The novel has moments of brilliance and poignancy, but like Couland's other works, it ultimately falls short of the promise it offers early.
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