Douglas Coupland
Life After God
Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that suffering is beautiful, and a million sad poets were born. I don’t buy it. Suffering is horrible. Certainly one can find beauty in any situation, and certainly beauty stands out in contrast to squalor and misery, and that sometimes makes it resonate all the more. But too many writers get confused, and think that by writing squalor and misery, they’ve written beauty. It just ain’t so. Coupland makes the mistake in “Life After God”. His characters are dejected and depressed, but there’s no art in them. There doesn’t seem to be any message other than the fact that everyday life is kind of pointless, which is certainly true if you live a pointless kind of life. But that doesn’t make a character beautiful. On the contrary, it makes a character whiny and horrible. And that ain’t art.
Perhaps ironically, probably the best story in the book is “The Wrong Sun”, an essay about nuclear holocaust. It works precisely because it doesn’t wallow in self-perceived personal suffering. Instead, it just presents a series of first-person narratives about people’s lives when The Bomb detonates. The TV goes to static. The shopping mall collapses. Office chairs are overturned. But there’s no panic or sadness in the narratives — it’s a dramatic event described blandly, instead of a bland event described melodramatically. In that sense, “The Wrong Sun” reverses the formula of the rest of the book, and for that reason it stands out.
I guess when I was a teenager, I had a taste for melodrama. I guess I figured that if I made myself suffer enough, I would just *have* to make good art out of it. And from that angle, “Life After God” might have appealed to me. Now it just seems self-indulgent. God is dead. Fine. Your neighbors aren’t. Go give ’em a hand with something, and get over yourself.
