From Publisher's Weekly:
In Coupland's real-time near-apocalyptic novel, a recovering alcoholic, a divorcée, a church-fund embezzler, a beautiful android-like woman, and a man who is distinguished by his prickly demeanor converge in an airport cocktail lounge at the precise moment when oil prices begin to rise and society begins to unravel around them. Such an intriguing premise could have lead to explorations of the nature of chaos and human resilience, but the author relies instead on cursory philosophizing, allowing his characters to ramble. The players emerge as near-caricatures who are forced to contend with each other's weaknesses and a small cast of strangers, from a sniper to a "false prophet" selling the Leslie Freemont Power Dynamics program. In one man's brusque assessment, the others are "a depressing grab bag of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of the most banal form of capitalism," words which reveal both the book's vivid style and an apt critique of modern consciousness. Though the book at times feels more like television than a richly conceived world, painting aspects of adults in crisis perhaps too broadly, it is redeemed an ending that allows some of them to survive.
About Douglas Coupland:
(Cherie's favourite author...)
Douglas Coupland was born on December 30, 1961. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and Generation X. He has published thirteen novels, a collection of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. Coupland has been described as “…possibly the most gifted exegete of North American mass culture writing today.” and “one of the great satirists of consumerism”. A specific feature of Coupland’s novels is their synthesis of postmodern religion, Web 2.0 technology, human sexuality, and pop culture.
Coupland currently lives in West Vancouver, British Columbia with his partner David Weir. He published his twelfth novel Generation A in 2009. He also released an updated version of City of Glass and a biography on Marshall McLuhan for Penguin Canada in their Extraordinary Canadians series, called Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan. He is the presenter of the 2010 Massey Lectures, and a companion novel to the lectures, Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland has been longlisted twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and 2010, respectively., was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2009, and was nominated for the BC Book/Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2011 for Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.
Coupland currently lives in West Vancouver, British Columbia with his partner David Weir. He published his twelfth novel Generation A in 2009. He also released an updated version of City of Glass and a biography on Marshall McLuhan for Penguin Canada in their Extraordinary Canadians series, called Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan. He is the presenter of the 2010 Massey Lectures, and a companion novel to the lectures, Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland has been longlisted twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and 2010, respectively., was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2009, and was nominated for the BC Book/Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2011 for Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.
Since I suggested this book, I figured I’d kick things off. However, I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I won’t go into some of the details that you might find interesting…until you add stuff too.
ReplyDeleteDouglas Coupland is my favourite author. I love his books because they make you THINK. I wouldn’t call Player One his best book, but I really enjoyed it. When I got it, I read it two times in a row. I find the more you read his books, the more you get out of them. You see new things, new ideas, new thoughts.
It is not a normal book. He provides commentary on seemingly ordinary people, but they are full of brilliant and extraordinary ideas. Sometimes the characters annoy me, but they are real. The love….the hate…the failure…the hope…the measurement against others…real life…it’s all in Coupland’s novels.
One of the things I want to start out w/ is the brilliance of unrelated quotes or ideas. They often don’t illuminate or move the plot, but what they do is highlight the characters, show that these are not just ordinary people, accepting all, questioning nothing, living the American suburban 2.3 children white picket fence dream. These people – even if they look like that – are more than that. They want more than that.
Here are some quotes that have really moved me.
“You know, I bet if we froze right here and didn’t move and didn’t breathe, we could stop time from moving forward forever.” –Max, saying to Karen
(This idea is also used in Coupland’s Life After God)
“He didn’t feel lost, but he didn’t feel found either.”
--Regarding Luke
(I love this idea b/c it shows that people, even when religious! – are not one or the other. Maybe they’re searching, but not because they feel lost, but because that’s what we do.
Also, on Luke – yeah, he’s religious, but he didn’t annoy me. Partially because he seemed so REAL. So Human. Even charity (the church) was not helping – what is? Religion is not always the answer – love this idea!)
“My head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and this churning and no real sense of where the earth ends and where the heavens begin.”
“He never realized it could be this easy.”
(On how easy it is to give up alcohol for sex/love/a woman)
“Personality is more like…a potato salad composed of your history plus all of your body’s quirks, good and bad.” –Karen to Rachel
“You’d think it would [hurt], but no. In fact, it was kind of cool. Like my soul slipped out of my skin for a second, like a salmon jumping out of a river.”
--Rick, on getting stabbed
I also love:
• The hypothesis of what really happens when you’re in the Witness Relocation Program (although someone actually told me there’s this huge community in New Mexico outside of Albuquerque where all these people live…)
• That Rachel’s father says her beauty makes her existence tragic – because it shows how beauty is valued and although she’s gorgeous and intelligent, her emotion makes her NOT a person – and interesting how she learns more abt being a person –and fr whom
• Karen’s idea of dressing up as the “Halloween version of yourself.”
• How we get cancer every day and it is killed before we know it – this idea is expounded upon in Coupland’s All Families Are Psychotic
• The idea of meeting your potential mate in a Peak Oil Apocalypse Chat Room (and I thought I met people weird ways – like when I met someone offering me liquid THC while dancing on a purple bus from Colorado and we were both covered in sparkles)
• Warren’s “bright” idea that separates him from everyone else
• Is this what the end will be like? Could this happen?
• How Max’s family loses the rental car…including the keys getting tossed in the gas tank
And also – what do you think?
What are your thoughts on the sniper?
Why don’t they do the obvious w/ the sniper?
I agree with Cherie, that this is not Coupland's best work. I was entertained, though, for most of the book -- until the end, when Rachel was hovering between life and death and started expounding on god, then I was utterly bored and frankly disappointed with the ending.
ReplyDeleteI was really excited about the apocalyptic premise of the book: a world without oil, because of course that day is growing ever near. But the shortness of the novel was barely enough to scrape the surface of the chaos the world will face when this happens. Perhaps Coupland didn't mean to delve into this topic as in depth as I would have liked him to - I get freaked out when I think about it a lot! So I'll not fault him for the brevity of the book ;)
I don't think any of the characters were extraordinary, even Rachel: in my reading of the novel, they are ordinary people trying to overcome their own personal issues, find love, find happiness, live their lives as best they can, which is arguably what most people want. Rachel, in fact, who approaches the extraordinary in the beginning, plunges right into ordinary at the end because she is so determined to prove that she is human through her desire to have a child.
Their ordinariness is exemplified when the power goes out, and Karen keeps trying her BlackBerry, later when she uses Max's iPhone to view his photos and keep his mind off of his pain. Don't get me wrong, I love my BB and will probably try to do the same at first (if I haven't said goodbye to it before this point).... Plus the fact that they barricade themselves inside and sit kind of helplessly waiting out the chemical cloud. I suppose there was little they could do at that point, but nothing extraordinary in that behaviour, that's what most people would do.
As for some observations, I did mark some passages that I liked which I'll post later tonight or this week. One that I remember is on p 202, when Luke is talking about wanting to be
immortalized via google and wikipedia, ironic because with no oil, there is no power, therefore no access to wiki and goog. Isn't this what most humans want, to be immortalized? Or not even to necessarily be immortalized but to be remembered. Rachel through her mice breeding and, later, through her desire to have a child.
Regarding the sniper: my guess is that nobody wanted to take responsibility for killing him (right away). Perhaps they were a little fascinated by his behaviour as well and wanted to learn more about him.
Finally, I don't mean to trash the book! I did enjoy it. Just offering some more, different things to think about, which is the beauty of a book club.
BTW, so far, my favourite post-apocalyptic book is Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. I think it meshes well with my imagination of what will happen during the end of days....
ReplyDeleteSo I just saw myself in a random window and the Halloween costume idea came back to me: that was brilliant, I really enjoyed that passage of the book. Looking over another passage I liked, when Lenny the piano player is getting fired, he says "people listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge, you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else." And now, it hits me, this is what these characters all want, what a lot of real people want: to be someone else....
ReplyDeleteArgh! One of my comments from last week is not here. Will have to try and remember what it was, it was positive....
ReplyDeleteOr - V - these characters want...to not be themselves. They recognize them as someone else (i.e., Karen doesn't see herself as a MILF)
ReplyDeleteGood point, one I agree with, I think yes, they do not want to be themselves. Hence Karen's viewing of herself as a Halloween Costume version of herself. This is what my mysteriously missing comment was about, actually. (I dug through my trash and can't find it. A friend of mine had comments disappear from her blog last week as well, so it must have been a blogger hiccup.) Or alluding to, I should say, since I didn't phrase it in this matter. Thanks for unveiling my thoughts once again, Cherie!
ReplyDeleteI read Karen's comment about dressing up for Halloween as oneself as a nod in recognition of how our identity--who we are, who we try to be, who we try to make people think we are, etc- is performed. I loved her comment, then, as a parody of identity.
ReplyDeleteI asked V about this in an email, but I'll post it to the group, too. What is the significance of the "Player One"/video game aspect of the novel? It seems to me that Rachel is like a female in a video game... did anyone else sense this? And, who/what was "player one" and what was its relationship to the plot?
As for the sniper, I think that when they bring in the sniper they don't yet fully comprehend what is happening, that the orderly, supposedly just, world in which they live has fallen apart. So, they tie up the sniper so that he can be turned over to the police when they arrive to save them... wishful thinking?
Amanda I never thought abt that - but maybe it's that Rachel is kind of robotic???
ReplyDeleteI was considering that yes, perhaps it's to show Rachel's "non-normalness" or her roboticness. Perhaps it's also more support of Cherie's idea that the characters don't want to be themselves.... or Amanda's idea that it is a paradoy of her identity.
ReplyDeleteIf so, then while the novel takes place during an apocalyptic environment/setting, perhaps Coupland is trying to make the point that no matter what happens, we're going to still be human, we're not going to lose our identities, our very real human fears, attachments, etc. So while the world is literally collapsing around us, we're still US, scared, trying to live in a world we don't understand, perhaps still trying to live up to unrealistic expectations that society places on us.
Even while that very society is collapsing.
ReplyDelete