Player One

Last Book Read: Player One - Douglas Coupland

"You can have information or you can have a life.  You can't have both."

"Time is the fire we burn in." - Soran, Star Trek: Generations

Although Douglas Coupland has missed the mark with some of his later works, Player One seems to be a logical extension of the thought process he began with Generation X.  Once again we are confronted with contemporary existence, as hyper-concious characters living in the margins of society contemplate individuality and meaning in the new superficial world.  And once again we are presented with an apocalyptic event without explanation.  What once seemed like a quirky and surreal diversion in his early works, now becomes clear as a central theme in the world Coupland is trying to reveal.  In his vision of  a "Life After God", meaningless and sudden catastrophe become a replacement for a purposeful intervention by God.  Reading this book amid news reports of a bleak economic future, Coupland's view of a sudden jolt of society into a "new normal" no longer seems like fantasy.  In a world that has become completely superficial, absurd events seem like the only way to force one to contemplate their place in the universe.  In this way I see Coupland not far from Camus, portraying the absurdity of life in relation to violence and death in works like The Plague.

This book is perhaps Coupland's most post-modern work, touching on themes such as the spectacle in consumer society, hyperreality in "no places" like airports, and meaningful life as as a complete narrative (or the lack of one).  Two themes seem to emerge as the most significant as the book asks the question: How is life played out?  First is the nature of the human self.  What makes a person who they are? Is it just neurological processes which revolve around defects in functioning mixed with pop-culture influences?  Is individuality really just a propagated falsehood as postmodernism suggests?  Here, Coupland uses interesting character traits in the autistic, geek Rachel [1] and in opposition refers to characters who have Alzheimer's disease which very literally erases who they are.  Second, the book constantly contemplates the nature of time.  Does time exist as a dimension so that one can experience a life among events? Written as a real-time five hour story, the book does break from linearity with Player One's viewpoint from "no time." It also breaks from traditional narrative, lacking much in the way of a beginning, middle, and end. Rather it mixes time to show that eternity, infinity, and a whole life can be experienced in the matter of seconds or minutes.

When it comes time to remember what life was like before and during the transition to the new-normal postmodern, post-9/11 world, I see no better record keeper than Coupland, and I already miss the colorful and discreet world that existed as we entered the period of Generation X before the subsequent mixing of everything into a homogenous blandness.  In the new virtual and connected information world we are all "Player One", but will we continue to be players in our own lives?



[1] Rachel plays on the 21st century coolness of geek culture, much in the way the Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory does.