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Microserfs
By Douglas Coupland
(HarperCollins, 371
pages, $25)
Douglas Coupland may yet make people forget that he came up with the term
“Generation X.” The title of Coupland’s first novel in 1990, it was
instantly appropriated by demographers, journalists, advertisers, movie
producers and trend-explainers. It was beaten to death through repetition
and misapplication. Still, that novel expressed strikingly familiar
situations, types and inchoate longings that many members of this atomized
group had been convinced nobody else shared. That ability to detect the
zeitgeist ahead of everyone else remains the core of Coupland’s fiction —
including his new novel, Microserfs, a title that may well supplant
Generation X as the hot new buzzword.
Microserfs began as an assignment a from Wired magazine — a
glimpse into the working life at Bill Gates’ fabulously successful computer
software development company, Microsoft Corp., in Redmond, Wash. Coupland’s
piece, which appeared in the January, 1994 issue, focused on the thousands
of code-writers, bug-checkers, software wizards and mouse-jockeys who are
changing the way humans work, one line of code at a time. In the novel.
Coupland’s work as a magazine writer — with his reportorial eye for detail,
nuance and telling fact — creates a vivid fictional landscape.
The story opens with narrator Daniel Underwood beginning to keep a journal
as a means of understanding his explicable bouts of insomnia. At work,
Daniel scans millions of lines of complex computer code seeking bugs to
eliminate. But the glitches bedeviling his life are not so easily
dispatched. Daniel is brilliant, but only within the confines of his
vocation. “Isn’t there supposed to be more to life than this?” he wonders.
So do his fellow “microserfs,” with whom Daniel shares a communal “geek
house.” The answer, of course, is yes, but identifying that elusive “more”
is tricky.
Soon, Daniel and his friends abandon the security of Microsoft to start
their own software development firm. But this story is not some Horatio
Alger-style climb via pluck and luck. Business success is seldom — if ever —
in doubt. One of Coupland’s recurring themes is a “secret life” — a
spiritual realm that lurks just beyond everyday perception. Slowly, the
Microserfs discover chunks of that terrain and find they have, in fact,
managed to “get a life.”
Much of the book’s strength lies in Coupland’s witty commentary on the mass
culture flotsam and inane diversions that distract his characters from more
profound concerns. The author’s take on pop trends is neither fetishistic
nor mock-reverent. Nor, refreshingly, is it a cranky jeremiad. Instead,
Coupland frequently mismatches pieces of popular culture in ironic collages.
At one point, Daniel — after being chided by a Marxist co-worker for eating
the cereal Lucky Charms, “symptomatic of a culture in decline” — writes a
list of all the decadent cereals on a whiteboard at work. Under the heading
Rice Krispies, he scrawls, “Snap, Krackle, and Pop thinly veiled emblems for
the Trilateral Commission.”
By the conclusion of the novel. Coupland has achieved an emotional depth
that. having sprung from deceptively banal ingredients, is both surprising
and satisfying. As bright and detailed as a digital snapshot. Microserfs
illuminates not only the particulars of life at the moment, but the larger,
more troubling and constant conundrums of existence. |
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