Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming By Jeet Heer Ottawa Citizen (January 2000) Judging from his new novel Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland feels a special affinity for has-been celebrities. The title character, Susan Colgate goes from being a teen beauty queen (Miss USA Teen 1985), to an adolescent sit-com star, to a young rock-and-roll wife, to an over-the-hill B-movie actress: a burnt out case at age 28. Boarding a plane, Colgate is overwhelmed by "Where-Are-They-Now waves of pity" from her fellow coach class passengers. Interestingly, the arc of Coupland's career follows Colgate's trajectory of early success dwindling into disappointment. At age 30 Coupland wrote a book that entered our language. Generation X (1991) did more than create a new journalistic cliche and marketing category: it transformed Canadian literature. Coupland gleefully said goodbye to the acceptable style of Canlit, the grimly realistic novel of small town and rural life, preferably set during the Depression. He embraced everything that Canadians were supposed to reject, writing a book that was media-savvy, ironic, urban, and young. The international success of Generation X created a market for the hip, young Canadian writers who would emerge in the 1990s, notably Russell Smith, Lynn Crosbie, and Douglas Cooper. Ironically, Coupland was soon eclipsed by these followers. Simply on the level of craft, they write better prose, tell more compelling stories, and have sharper ears for dialogue. While he remains the most commercially-successful and influential Canadian writer of his generation, every new Coupland book has been a literary let-down. Like Francis Ford Coppola, Coupland does not let repeated failure slow him down. Miss Wyoming, his seventh book, is his latest energetic attempt at a come-back. What is new and exciting in the book is Coupland's intricate and crafty plotting. The novel follows Colgate's life story while also telling the parallel tale of John Johnson, a decadent and demoralized L.A. movie producer. Both Colgate and Johnson go through a rise and fall cycle while searching for authenticity and love. The two stories occasionally overlap while the narrative moves back and forth in time, yet the reader never gets lost in the skilful maze Coupland has constructed for his characters. Alas, the sophistication of Coupland's plotting is undermined by his weak prose. Some critics have praised Coupland's gift for inventive metaphors. Unfortunately, these unique metaphors, which pop up on almost every page, are usually illogical and jarring. Here is Coupland's description of a widow investing her love of her dead husband in their child. "Yet she cherished her lovely memory of Piers in this red roast of beef baby who wailed like the thrashed clutch of a Chevrolet." Any mediocre novelist could compare a baby to meat or car noises, but it takes a master of mixed metaphors to put such language in a single sentence. Even Coupland's characters start talking in unexpected metaphors. Here is a hill-billy stage-mother arguing with her beauty pageant daughter. "I think of the time I spend trying to make you the winningest little girl in Oregon and I start to feel like those inmates in orange jumpsuits picking up litter on the side of the Interstate." On the next page, mom also says, "Susan, your eyes are like two cherry pits spit onto the floor." Coupland is slightly more skilful at capturing the in-the-know lingo of Hollywood insiders. Yet even here, in Coupland's area of expertise, better dialogue can be found at the video store (Robert Altman's The Player) or on cable TV (The Larry Sanders Show). As with all bad writing, these stylistic flaws are symptoms of a deeper malady. A writer who deeply knows his characters and their world will find the right words to tell their stories. The language will flow out of his very experiences. A writer who draws from second-hand experience, gathered from the mass media, will tell his story in cliche or use gimmicky prose to cover up his lack of knowledge, as Coupland does. Coupland's characters (the overbearing stage-mother, the fading child star, the drug-abusing movie producer) are long familiar to us from tabloid gossip, TV melodramas and B-movies. Apparently Coupland believes that schlock culture can be mined for life-giving truths. Without irony, Coupland tells us that when John Johnson was young he was often sick and "soaked in abnormally large amounts of daytime TV programming....TV loaned him a vocabulary and a tinge of sophistication lacking in others his own age." This "tinge of sophistication" supposedly helps Johnson become a hugely successful movie producer. Only a novelist with such an absurd faith in the power of soup operas would write so corny a novel, heavily dependant on coincidence and unexpected disasters. The central idea of the book is that Hollywood phonies can become more authentically human if they experience gut-wrenching tragedies (plane crashes, near-death illnesses, temporary status as a hobo). This is exactly the type of trite "sophistication" that we get from soup operas. Coupland tries hard to win back the audience in Miss Wyoming but this weak book will not help him regain his lost literary crown.