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By Jennifer Davies
Photos by Christopher Gardner

Let me simply say that history is happening, it's happening now and it's happening here, in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

--Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

On a particularly hot day this June, a few of the faithful have braved the thermometer to attend a "unique" booksigning at the Tech Museum in downtown San Jose. Most author appearances are casual freebies--writers don't rank that high on the celebrity food chain--but to gain admittance to this one, everyone must don a white plastic "clean-room" suit and rubber gloves. If you worked on a computer assembly line, you'd feel right at home.

Too bad the Tech Museum's not-so-high-tech air conditioner is on the blink. Despite the muggy atmosphere, the attendees dutifully, albeit awkwardly, slip into the paper-thin plastic suits. They take turns hopping on one foot as they force their limbs into the crinkly pant legs. They shimmy as they pull the garment up and over their hips and then poke their hands through the small elasticized arm holes. The front zipper is yanked up with a quick flourish, indicating a real sense of accomplishment.



Coupland in Cyberland:
The MicroFans Get Defensive



The reward? A chance to meet Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and erstwhile voice of the twentysomethings. Coupland's newest book, Microserfs, is supposed to do for the programmers, code warriors and overworked techies of Silicon Valley what his first novel did for the gen-Xers. Hence the clean-suit ploy.

Coupland himself, however, doesn't bother with the uncomfortable get-up. Instead, he opts for his own type of costume: a trés-hip gray retro suit with pegged pant legs, a thin black tie, a crisp white shirt and black ankle boots. His own expansive forehead glistening with sweat, Coupland enforces the dress code vigorously. He even refuses to be interviewed by one reporter who complains about wearing the nonventilated clean suit in such heat.

"I just do this for fun and love and all that good stuff," Coupland says, explaining the publicity gimmick to the cranky reporter. Well, okay. So why isn't he wearing the suit?

"I'm the host," he says with confidence.

Host of an orchestrated lovefest at which he is the only individual with any individuality while the rest of the drones must swelter for the chance to participate in the promotion of Microserfs-which may or may not be a metaphor for what work in the computer trenches is really like; gauging Coupland's irony quotient is tricky business. He doesn't even sign copies of his book. Instead, he perfunctorily embosses them with a seal that reads, "To my close personal friend, [blank], signed Douglas Coupland."



Gorillas in the Smog



Spain had Hemingway. Paris had Proust. Los Angeles had Chandler. Now Silicon Valley has ... Douglas Coupland. That's progress of a sort, if only because so much of the literature out of this region so far has been computer manuals.

Generation X was supposed to give voice to disaffected, disenfranchised, discontented young adults. Microserfs is aimed at providing workaholic computer geeks with their moment in pop-culture's rapidly shifting spotlight.

As a comment on the death of manual typewriters, the novel is told in the form of the diary of Daniel Underwood, a 26-year-old programmer. The story, if you could call it that, recounts the experiences of seven Microsoft employees who work long hours and have no personal lives. When one of them starts his own company to design a virtual-reality Lego program, the others join him, quitting their jobs in Washington and moving to Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Francisco.

The book is filled with typographical and literary gimmicks. The fonts and typefaces change with all the capriciousness of the desktop-publishing era. To flesh out the seven main characters, Coupland lists each one's optimum Jeopardy! category.

Indeed, lists seem to be Coupland's forte. They are strewn throughout the book as a shorthand-make that menu-driven-way to describe people and places, such as the group's working conditions and items sold at a collective garage sale.

Then there are the compare-and-contrast tables, similar to the ones Coupland has contributed to The New Republic. In a 1993 edition of that magazine, Coupland likened the corporate downsizing at IBM to McDonald's. In Microserfs, Coupland compares corporate cultures using employee car models: Microsoft, gray Lexus; Apple, white Ford Explorer.

As a novelistic observer of the subtleties of societal mores, Coupland is no Thackery or Balzac. If there's a short cut to be taken, Coupland takes it. He tosses around such names as the Empire Tap Room in Palo Alto and describes a geek party in San Carlos or such hot spots as Fry's Electronics and Chili's in Cupertino but rarely provides telling details or nuances.

If you live here, the name-game is amusing, but for outsiders, the book offers no sense of place. The Silicon Valley of Microserfs doesn't feel lived in; it feels visited. Which isn't all that surprising, giving Coupland's methodology.

In an interview with The New York Times last year, Coupland said he spent three weeks in Redmond, Wash., with programmers at Microsoft trying to get their lifestyle down.

"It was a real Gorillas in the Mist kind of observation," Coupland explained. "What do they put in their glove compartments? What snack foods do they eat? What posters are on their bedroom wall?"

I get a glimpse of Coupland's method at the booksigning when he says of his tour stop in San Jose, "This is the one that's real important. This is the one that really counts, because these are the people who I'm writing about." Where is he spending the night? San Francisco.

He explains that he had to stay there because friends were flying in, and they didn't know how to get to Silicon Valley or San Jose. Couldn't he have given them directions? In fact, in Microserfs, he does just that:

It is a backward J-shaped strand of cities, starting at the south of San Francisco and looping down the bay, east of San Jose: San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont. I used a map for this.


Coupland says he spent four months in the Silicon Valley trying to get the zeitgeist right, much of it at a friend's house in Palo Alto, which is probably why most of the book is set there. Asked how he gained an inside view of valley life, Coupland says, "I just went with flow. Techies are really friendly."



Interviews With Myself

On the program for the clean-suit booksigning is a screening of Coupland's video, Close Personal Friend, which is loosely based on Microserfs. The video consists mostly of Coupland's meanderings-condensed from the novel-on the mind-body-soul cleave in the late 20th century. It could have been retitled Interviews With Myself.

For almost 30 minutes, Coupland, against a white background, answers questions lobbed his way from an off-camera voice while scantily clad figures saunter in and out of the frame. The only time the camera strays from Coupland is when splices of classic commercials flash across the screen-presumably trenchant commentary about American materialism.

Although Coupland boasts in his press kit that the video "is dense with words, graphics and talk ... Beavis and Butt-head might not like it," Close Personal Friend is vintage MTV material, with portentous yet banal banter and the navel-gazing existentialism of youth everywhere.

Asked if there have been any complaints of self-aggrandizement about the video, Coupland seems genuinely bewildered, but he recovers quickly. "You weren't listening to what I was saying. You have to listen to the words. Pay close attention."



Generation Wired

Paying close attention to Coupland's words over the last few years hasn't been too hard. Since his rookie novel, Generation X, exploded onto the nation's consciousness, he's been dubbed the Voice of a Generation, a mantle he says he's not entirely comfortable with.

Who can blame him for feeling a little overwhelmed? Still, the burden hasn't stopped him from authoritatively rattling on about the plight of the younger generation and its subcultures, both in interviews and in his subsequent fiction.

That's pretty ironic coming from a 33-year-old Canadian. The Micro-serfs book-jacket biography says Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in West Germany. One of four brothers, Coupland grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, the city he still calls home. After graduating from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver with a degree in studio sculpture, Coupland took a variety of low-paying jobs.

He began his career as a writer by covering art scandals for a magazine in Vancouver, until he convinced St. Martin's Press to give him a $22,500 advance to write Generation X, which originally was supposed to be a nonfiction book.

Following Generation X, Coupland penned another novel, Shampoo Planet (1993), and a collection of short stories, Life After God (1994). All deal with the lack of meaning and prosperity, financial or otherwise, for today's young adults.

After signing on to write for Wired magazine, Coupland went in search of a new lifestyle to chronicle and settled on the computer-geek subculture. Coupland explains in his book tour's promotional material that he wanted to explore the techie's life, or lack thereof. A life, he describes, spent huddled in front of computer terminals for hours on end churning out streams of code.

Despite the bleak description, Coupland insists that he considers technology life-affirming rather than inherently alienating. This paradox haunts Coupland both in Microserfs and in his interviews. For instance, he writes and speaks about Bill Gates in glowing strains, although many in the computer industry don't view Gates quite that lovingly.

Bernard de la Cruz, a student at UCSD who attended Coupland's book reading in San Diego, says Coupland called America's antipathy toward Gates another symptom of "Forrest Gumplike" anti-intellectualism. Cruz writes, via e-mail, "I called him on it, saying computer-type people hate Bill Gates because he has suppressed the original 'hacker' culture, taken away the creativity and made it corporate, using the gains of the deal, which was the moral equivalent of paying the smart kid for his science-fair project then selling it to a company that realized its product potential."

Cruz recounts that Coupland changed his mind and agreed with Cruz about how Gates gained his success, but then contended that Gates now has earned the revered respect of his workers.

At the booksigning, Coupland says the real aim of Microserfs is to examine how his characters find their lives and build new family structures from the rubble of the traditional nuclear family, which has been felled by divorce and distance.

The problem for Coupland, however, is that you cannot lionize Gates and romanticize the geek lifestyle and still have a book that effectively questions the brutal working conditions in many high-tech companies. In his race to put a positive spin on technology, Coupland misses the point, a point thoroughly detailed in G. Pascal Zachary's book Showstopper!, a nonfiction account of the creation of Microsoft's newest Windows NT program. The book by the Wall Street Journal reporter and occasional Metro contributor demonstrates how the mind-numbing demands of creating new technology all but eliminate life's other obligations and joys such as family and friends.

Coupland treats this sad fact with flip, sitcom irreverence, which is why his fiction feels steered more by market research than by a real attempt to grapple with the meaning of life in modern times. There is something calculating about Coupland's choice of subject matter-and what's worse is he seems to know it.

During his presentation at the Tech Museum, Coupland joked about reading his short stories to the audience. "I'll do it in a deadpan and then I'll sound like Bret Easton Ellis." That's a pretty smart-ass remark considering that, at best, Coupland is the Bret Easton Ellis of the '90s, or maybe the Jay McInerney. At least Ellis, for all his dark-side vagaries in Less Than Zero or Rules of Attraction, really knew what he was writing about.

Coupland, on the other hand, seems like a one-man Megatrends, always searching for the next big thing. Although Coupland can be blamed for the quality of Generation X, which was a surprise hit, the subsequent saturation is something we in the media should be flogged for.

Since then, each of his novels seems to have been designed to reach a niche market, even if Coupland disingenuously distances himself from such a notion. During a recent America Online interview, for instance, Coupland said, "I don't think it's possible to reverse-engineer books, as in, 'Hey! There's this hot new trend. Let's write a bestseller about it!' "

Shampoo Planet aims for the younger half of the twentysomething crowd, and Life After God is littered with characters inorganically engineered to cover all bases, from an alcoholic aerobics instructor to an HIV-positive stockbroker.

And then there's Microserfs, which plays into an outsider's intrigue with the geek enigma and yet appeals to the same market that has helped Wired become an overnight success.

Reverse engineering or not, Coupland has a keen sense of what is hip; he is as consumed by the minutiae of pop culture as Stephen King. His novels, especially Microserfs, are littered with references to Tang, Legos, Melrose Place and so on.

The effect is to make the reader doubt the characters' emotional turmoil. And, trust me, the characters deal with a lot-from a bout with cancer to a stroke to coming to grips with their homosexuality. Yet none of these traumas resonate with the reader. The book is too busy name-dropping to explore these demons. It's the literary equivalent of channel-surfing, a novel for chronic sufferers of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Of course, Coupland would dismiss such criticism as cynical, and he hates cynicism.

"I'm just so tired of all the cynicism. I'm just so sick of it," Coupland says with a dramatic weariness. But one can't help but think Coupland is using cynicism as a way to deflect any criticism of his fiction: If you didn't get the good-hearted vibe, then it's your flinty soul that's the problem, not his skills as a storyteller.



Version 1.1

Prior to the arrival of his "guests" at the Tech Museum, Coupland runs around checking the sound system, making sure that his audience will be able to hear what he, and his video, have to say.

A film crew from the syndicated entertainment television show Extra! is on hand to interview Coupland, who promptly throws a fit because there is too much commotion. "I want five minutes undiluted time with you," Coupland tells the film crew with authority.

Finally the shot is set up with Coupland in front of a large video screen, his video of himself rolling in the background. Before he starts to talk, Coupland grabs his glass of white wine, lifting it to his lips as the light from the television screen refracts through the clear liquid. For effect, he takes a big, but graceful, swig. He then trains his undiluted attention on the film crew and begins to answer their questions with the conscientiousness of a Catholic school boy.

At one point, Coupland proclaims the interview process bankrupt, saying people are becoming more and more the same, a theme discussed in Microserfs at some length. This platitude about humanity's sameness, like many of his grand pronouncements, rings hollow. If he really thinks the interview process is ridiculous, why is he talking to Extra!, of all informational conduits?

Coupland wants to sell books, that's why. With this snazzy book tour and HarperCollins publishers behind him, Coupland is making a high-profile splash. One press account put the book tour and publicity budget at $125,000. The reviews, however, haven't lived up to the hype. The San Jose Mercury News, for instance, complained that Coupland botched some of the details of valley life.

Coupland appears to take criticism of his work lightly, telling the audience at the Tech Museum that any errors they found in the book would be fixed in Version 1.1. But when asked about the critical Mercury News review that castigated Coupland for referring to El Camino Real as the Camino Real and other details, Coupland gets a little huffy.

"Mr. Local Dude resents people who come into his town to write a book," Coupland says, bobbing his head to punctuate his point. "I thought four months was a lot of time to spend researching. People who work in these companies all do consider the book frighteningly real."

Some just consider it frightening. Lori Matsumoto, a microserf for Sun Microsystems, says that the book had little to do with her life. It took vague truths, such as not having a life, and used them as quirky scene fodder.

"Yeah, I may say I have no life, but I certainly don't say it all the time or while I'm sitting in front of the television watching a Gilligan's Island episode and drinking Tang," Matsumoto says with an edge to her sarcasm.

She says if somebody really wanted to understand the computer-geek subculture there are several books more illuminating, such as Down in the Valley, a novel written by Sun Microsystems employee David Pierce, and an anthology of essays called Resisting the Virtual Life.

Rob Chansky, who works as a system analyst for Adobe, says he liked Microserfs, although he felt that it was limited and exaggerated the lifestyle for effect.

"There was really no description of anything," Chansky says. "Like I think a lot of things are pretty unique around here, and he didn't really mention what anything looked like."

As for Coupland's obsession with brand names, Chansky says, "He's so commercial-oriented. If you could look into his head, I bet you would see brand names floating by."



X Marks the Spot

Before Coupland premieres his video at the Tech Museum, he reads a few short stories. After his presentation, the tape rolls, and Coupland retreats to the foyer. As he sits down at one of the tables toward the back of the room, the effects of the wine and long hours of his book tour seem to be taking their toll. He closes his eyes and leans his head against the wall.

Earlier in the evening, a woman came up to him gushing about how she loved Generation X but could not bring herself to finish it because it was too much like her life. Does this kind of adulation ever bother or unnerve the Voice of His Generation? Does he ever feel unworthy? "No, because my fans are intelligent," Coupland answers with assurance.

As part of his generation, I feel protective and resentful of Coupland all at once. Most critics dismiss Coupland and other young writers, arguing that their literary devices and forms are as shallow and self-absorbed as their generation.

Although I'd like to like Coupland, I don't find his books defensible. Despite their angst and quest for meaning, they are shallow and self-absorbed. His prose shows the occasional flash of insight and even beauty. But instead of taking the time to craft something larger than a quicky cool-scene zine, he seems content with smart-alecky lists and quick-witted definitions. Coupland is clever but not terribly smart, which makes for a great ad writer, but not a novelist.

Before rejoining the group of video watchers, Coupland considers his speech presentation. "I hope I came across as sincere and not plastic," he muses earnestly. He doesn't seem to realize he's only worried about appearing sincere. Sincerity, of course, is necessary to a non-plastic image.

And that's the one thing you most notice about Coupland. He understands and is painfully aware of image. The effect is to make you wonder how sincere he really is. He seems to believe everything he says, which is simultaneously troubling and reassuring. How can someone so preoccupied with image also be so concerned with the meaning of life in the waning years of the 20th century? On second thought, though, it makes perfect sense.

In a recent Details magazine essay, Coupland proclaimed Generation X dead and begged for his compatriots to rail against the evil forces of marketing. "The problems started when trendmeisters everywhere began isolating small elements of my characters' lives ... and blew them up to represent an entire generation," Coupland wrote. "Then the marketing began. ... This demographic pornography was probably what young people resented the most about the whole X explosion. I mean, sure, other fringe movements of the past-the '20s expats in Paris, the '50s Beats, '60s hippies, '70s punks-all got marketed in the end, but X got hypermarketed right from the start, which was harsh."

Coupland, of course, is right. Thirty-second attempts to sell an image consume much of modern life. But every time someone like Coupland uses a Shake 'n Bake commercial or a Brady Bunch episode or some trendy facet of computer culture as a signifier of some larger meaning, they've taken a short cut. Instead of railing against the force of 20th-century commercialism, they are co-opted by it. Semantics is erased, real context is gone and image is all that remains.

Coupland rises from his seat in the foyer to return to his guests, who will soon be done with viewing his video. He has one last request as he turns to leave. Standing over me, Coupland raises his hands up and down as if praying to Allah and begs, "Don't decontextualize me."

Coupland's subjects might make the same request of him.

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