Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland

What if someone said something cool, and no one came?

By Dave Shulman

First published in L.A. Weekly, June 23, 1995.

May I take this opportunity? Thanks. Somehow, around 2009, corporate media decided to define Baby Boomers as those born between 1946 and 1964, followed by Generation X. Coupland, who’s credited with coining the term Generation X to refer to his peers, was born in 1961. Just sayin’.

A note to our readers:

For those of you who may not have time to read the whole review but would like to scan an abbreviated version, here:

Three hundred seventy-one pages of whiny white people in their 20s (and early 30s) moving from computer-geek jobs in Redmond, Washington, to computer-geek jobs in Silicon Valley, arrogantly whining in cutesy-hip neolanguage about how unjust it is that they’re whiny white people in their 20s (and early 30s) arrogantly whining about the injustice of it all.

This is the Gallagher of 20th-century novels.

—D.S.

“X IS OVER,” Generation X author Douglas Coupland says in Details (“Generation X’d,” June ’95). “I’d like to declare a moratorium on all the noise, because the notion that there now exists a different generation — X, Y, K, whatever — is no longer debatable. Kurt Cobain’s in heaven, Slacker’s at Blockbuster, and the media refers to anybody aged 13 to 39 as Xers. Which is only further proof that marketers and journalists never understood that X is a term that defines not a chronological age but a way of looking at the world.”

Oh good. X is over. Smoke easy, Cult of Melrosia. Donate your designer angstwear to the Salvation Army so you can buy it back in 40 years when there’s no more Social Security or Medicare. You will really need clothes.

That Generation X way of looking at the world — romantically ironic, arrogantly sentimental — can be found broadcast nightly on MTV’s Alternative Nation, where, if you look around a bit, you might find the Tomhanksian profile of Coupland himself, with some romantic, ironic, arrogant, sentimental voice-overs paired with zealous, I-just-learned-digital video-editing.

But, thank God, it’s over now.

So we’re not allowed to judge Coupland’s Microserfs in terms of its (in)ability to exude X-ness. And while we’re not doing that, let’s also ignore its blatant sloppiness (all the characters who sound like the same character, the word cool used to the point of nausea, and, on page 153, “Michael nods. Ethan agrees.” Problem: Michael is not in the room . . . ). Instead, we’ll concentrate on disliking Microserfs on its merits.

***

A 371-page scene column (as in “say, baby, Who’s makin’ the scene?”), Microserfs is a True Confessions-style series of journal entries by pithy-hip moralist Daniel Underwood, 26-year-old Microsoft code-writing geek. It traces his sadly shallow life, along with those of his fellow geeky code-writer roommates, from late ’93 Redmond, Washington, down to ’94 Silicon Valley and out for the obligatory morality-questioning trip to Vegas in early ’95.

(Daniel, you see, had a younger brother, Jed, who died in a boating accident. Jed was the “real” genius in the family, so now Daniel has the classic I Must Live Up To syndrome — he thinks bad thoughts about himself!)

We meet Daniel, his new girlfriend, Karla, and their friends Susan, Todd, Michael, Abe and Bug Barbecue saying cute zany things and complaining about the ’70s. Then Michael, the smart one, moves to Silicon Valley, hooks up with capitalist Ethan (the one with skin cancer and dandruff), and comes up with a creative way to make money. Michael e-mails the others, and all but Abe quit their jobs and move down to start up a new OOP (object-oriented programming) software company, Interiority Co.

Daniel’s dad loses his job at IBM, so Michael, the genius guy, the one who moved down to Silicon Valley first, teaches Mr. Underwood (he calls him “Underhill” sometimes — it’s real funny, maybe) to write C++ code and then he’s all better. And then they talk more about people and things from the ’70s.

Well:

Mrs. Underwood doesn’t get along well with Karla!

Karla’s parents just make her mad! They always told her she was stupid!

Abe is hard on himself because he has a million dollars but still lives in a group home because he can’t forgive himself for having a million dollars! Before he joins the others in the Valley, his e-mails get sloppier and sloppier!

Bug Barbecue is hard on himself because he hasn’t figured out yet that he’s gay!

Todd lifts weights and becomes a communist! So does his new girlfriend, Dusty! Then they have a baby!

Everyone is so hard on themselves!

And Mrs. Underwood is paralyzed by a stroke while everyone else is at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas! So they come home and hook her up to a Mac, and she can communicate with them again, and Daniel thinks about his brother, Jed!

(In the edition I got, Coupland or ReganBooks inadvertently left out the drawings and exclamation marks. I don’t have the energy to do the drawings.)

***

Coupland’s characters are so flat, and so flat-out reverent about their irreverences, they become the people they spend their every moment ridiculing. Like the ridicule art-school kids so cohesively level at Greeks across campus, the adherence to the code of their smug insolence is as offensive as the racist/classist fratfilth they purport to despise. They go on never noticing, it seems, that, in the words of Lenny Bruce, “An understanding of syphilis is not an instruction to get it.”

Much as a poorly curated museum exhibit tends to look more like a big white room filled with stuff than an exhibition of the artwork itself, Coupland tries so hard to be important and insightful that this desire is all he ends up communicating. Having insight does not automatically give someone the ability to communicate the sight found within; Coupland may be telling us a story about people so overwhelmed by semiotics that they’re rendered babbling whiny idiots, but he does not convince me that he as author is anything but equally overwhelmed. He’s unable to accomplish the most necessary and difficult thing a novelist most do: decide what to write about. Furthermore, the extent to which he’s tickled by his own quirky insights (some of them are truly hilarious) puts a thick, goopy filter over anything important he might try to say. I have no doubt that he’s a bright, kind and complicated man, but who can read his fiction through all that goop? It’s like when someone’s about to tell you a joke; instead of simply telling it, they say, “Here — I’m gonna tell you a joke. Wanna hear a joke?”

Well — no.

This goop is a fatal error, because when one of the main characters had cancer or gets paralyzed, we don’t give a damn. Who cares if Daffy Duck gets smashed up? He’ll be back after the commercials, good as new.

In his Details article, Coupland outlined the transition of Generation X from book title to marketing terms: “Trendmeisters everywhere began isolating small elements of my characters’ lives . . . and blew them up . . .  The result? Xers were labeled monsters. Their protestations became ‘whining’; being mellow became ‘slacking’; and the struggle to find themselves became ‘apathy.’”

I’ve heard a lot of people in their 20s and early 30s (I’m there, by the way) discuss their struggles, protests and relaxations with great intelligence and breadth. Certainly there are Beavises and Butt-heads of all ages. But only a few places I’m aware of present GenXers as unparalleled imbeciles: pop broadcast media (especially MTV) and Douglas Coupland novels.

But “I am anti-stupidity and pro-Microsoft,” Coupland announced to the L.A. Times, “if for no other reason than to battle the forces of dumbness.”

Perhaps while on his 10-city hypermarketing tour ($125,000 national marketing campaign, three-part syndicated radio interview, dramatic rights already sold to 20th Century Fox) Coupland might develop some new tools with which to do battle.

“Anyway,” inputs young Daniel Underwood, “I have spooged. Good night little PowerBook — my world will shortly end today, as will the universe . . . ”