Douglas Coupland is trying to sneak a peek at my notepad. He surveys the few lines I have written there, then falls back, and as our waiter approaches, mentions casually that I possess the handwriting of a serial killer. I harbour little doubt he is well versed in psychopath chirography, so I take care to hide my notebook from the staff here at Capers, a wholefood restaurant in downtown Vancouver.


Doug Coupland and I are indulging in “facetime.”¹ Our dinner conversation multitasks in a postmodern, microserfy, Couplandesque way.

We touch on a number of subjects²: why he hates interviews; whether other writers are part of a local scene unknown to him; the age and coolness quotient of the cars³ that stream below us; whether it’s time for him to get back to work; the consumer patterns of the average bookstore customer; the unforgettable associations that exclude certain foods (biscotti, cheesecake) from his palate. He does not rush in to fill dead air. He does not ask questions to which he already knows the answers. He does little to put an interviewer at ease. He orders soup and potstickers, then remembers that he is late for a half-hour photo shoot (arranged for this article)⁴, and strides quickly out of the restaurant.

The genre of his latest book, Polaroids from the Dead (see review, this page) is ambiguous – a hip swipe at the crumbling barrier between fiction and non-fiction. “It’s half fiction, half non-fiction,” he ventures later, rejecting terms like creative and narrative non-fiction. “I’m not going to create another label. I’m just curious to see where it ends up.”

Where the book will not end up, it is certain, is in Coupland’s hand at author readings and book promos. Halfway through his last tour, he decided to quit the circuit. So what does Coupland do to connect with his readers, with other writers, with the world he itemizes so lovingly?

He works a day a week at a Vancouver bookstore.

“This is a way of humanizing,” he explains during a 90-minute break in his noon-to-nine shift. “I’m notorious for hating touring and I live in this city. This is a way of doing something that’s intimately related to books yet not doing that idiotic dog and pony show. This is real. This is just so much more real than a tour.” For nine hours each Thursday, Coupland serves the trendy shoppers of Duthie’s 4th Avenue branch. The job offer came during a lunch with Duthie Books owner Celia Duthie: Coupland told her he’d always wanted to work in a bookstore. She made it so.⁵

“I don’t think it’s what a lot of [writers] do, but for four-and-a-half, five years now, every time I’ve been to a bookstore I haven’t been able to look at the books and I just wanted that to end. I just wanted to be able to feel natural in bookstores the way I used to feel.”⁶ Coupland fields several “sightings” per shift, but responds favourably to autograph requests. “You bump into a lot of people and it’s nice. It’s not quite like an episode of Ellen, but it’s all right.”

Feeling natural co-exists perilously with the reality of a certain measure of fame (Vancouver Magazine recently named Coupland one of the city’s most intelligent people; the French ministry of culture invited him to meet with “other” American writers of high status – like Saul Bellow and John Updike – in a misunderstanding that The Globe and Mail dubbed “L’Affaire Coupland”). Coupland enthusiastically calls Vancouver home, yet Polaroids explores new territory for a local writer who has, until now, set his stories consistently in the U.S. The middle section of the new three-part work offers readers a rare window into Coupland’s personal life and geography.⁷ These new descriptions of home arise, he says, from a more settled lifestyle: “I’m just tired of traveling, that’s all. I burnt myself out in ’95 traveling. I don’t want to do it any more. The next one [a novel in the planning stages] will be [set here] too.”

Communication is a central theme in Polaroids, but Coupland finds little incentive to network with book types, beyond his weekly shift at Duthie’s. “Writing is an implicitly isolating job. I think about, gee, what would it be like to have a community, but all you can really do is talk about the infrastructure of the business: how does your publisher do things⁸, or do you have an agent? Or how many frequent flyer points do you have⁹ and it all gets numerically pornographic and horrid. And what, you’re going to talk about writing? I think that’s something you should just do by yourself.”

This desire to keep to himself puts one in mind of the character Tyler, an articulate, incisive, hanger-back from Coupland’s second novel, Shampoo Planet, who distrusts platitudes, spontaneity, and, most of all, strangers. “Keep your face like a screen-saver software program,” he instructs. “Don’t let people know the ideas you love, the games you’ve played, the places you’ve visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself.”

I ask Coupland if he has ever interviewed another author. “No,” he replies, “because I wouldn’t want them to feel the way I feel. Instead of interviewing another person, I’d just suggest ‘go out and read the book’ because people who write are not necessarily good talkers. I see the interview as just an antique information form. I’d like to think we’d come up with new ways of dealing with the ways two people communicate with each other.”¹⁰

There’s a long pause, then Coupland asks me “What about writing? Shall we talk about writing? Enough about the infrastructure.” Willing to help subvert the interview, I reply “What would you like to say about writing?” to which he turns away and looks out the window. “You’re the interviewer.” We order dessert from yet another server (do they recognize him? have we spanned several work shifts?), but he announces abruptly that his break is over.

“Anything that really counts I’ve put in my books,” he sends as parting counsel. That, an autograph and his dessert, when it arrives, are the only treasures Douglas Coupland leaves me.

1 A neologism meaning person-to-person interaction. Other Coupland creations: “McJob” from Generation X, and, from Polaroids, “postfame,” meaning fame after death.

2 But not his ideal jeopardy categories: Life of Warhol; 1970s Pop Culture; Bamboo Cultivation; Antarctica; The Irish Potato Famine

3 Coupland drives a Jetta because his brother Bruce does too. He simply called the dealer that sold Bruce his car and asked for the same one (he hates shopping). His most hated car colour is flat red.

4 Coupland dislikes author photos. He also dislikes the idea of his books being made into films, which none of them currently is, although Microserfs is being turned into a pilot for the Fox network.

5 Doug Coupland’s previous retail experience involves selling pennants for the BC Lions and pumping gas, which he says has given him the ability to take apart a V-6 engine blindfolded. “Have you ever looked at the engine of a car now? It looks like a photocopier. I mean, where do I insert the toner cartridge?”

6 Coupland dismisses recent “hot” writers Deepak Chopra, Robert James Waller, and James Redfield as ciphers who write “in another language.”

7 “The salmon went back upstream,” Coupland says of himself (he now lives with his parents, which “is no longer stigmatized”).

8 The first edition of Generation X went to press unspellchecked. It’s used in some journalism school as a case study in spellchecking. Coupland also uses grammar checking software on drafts.

9 Coupland recently arrived back in Vancouver from New York, where he was making final design changes on Polaroids. He is closely involved with the look of his books. (He attended Emily Carr College of Art & Design and specialized in sculpture.)

10 Coupland prefers e-mail, but radio – in the afternoon or later – is okay, even though he doesn’t listen to it much. “I find there really is this whole radio culture out there – people who can’t live without their CBC.”