Adrianna Williams/Corbis/ Photograph by Brian Howell
Douglas Coupland—clothing and furniture designer, biographer, artist and sculptor, screenwriter, landscape architect and, oh yeah, author of Generation X and 12 other novels—insists he is not a Renaissance man but “just someone who went to art school. It makes you perpetually curious and you learn there’s always some new way of looking at an object or situation.”
Case in point: his five-hour-long Massey Lectures, which begin on Oct. 12, will take the form of a real-time, five-hour story—a novel, in other words. Player One is set in an airport cocktail lounge, where apocalypse and romance are on the agenda along with the Big Ideas you’d expect from a lecture series that has previously been helmed by the likes of Northrop Frye and Charles Taylor.
Coupland says he “wanted to take everything I’ve been doing since 1990 and to put it in Superman’s hand and have him crush it into a diamond.” Accordingly, Player One revisits quintessential Coupland themes, chiefly, how the speed of change, both technologically and socially driven, is altering the world, our own sense of self and our souls. “The future is happening so fast and furious right now, there’s no language to describe all these new sensations, so we have to begin inventing one,” says Coupland, who in Player One delivers a glossary for the future with such terms as “Bell’s law of telephony: no matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.”
For someone who’s been avant-garde for almost 20 years, Coupland is surprisingly down-to-earth, with a deep, jolly laugh that sounds too sincere for a hipster. Comments on his versatility are deflected with oh-but-you-could-do-it-too charm. “Look, even on the best day of writing you’re ever going to have in your life, it’s only going to be about 2½ hours of actual, ‘Wow, this is really shooting out of my brain’ time,” he says. “And then there’s the rest of the day. What are you going to do, go ride in a boat? No way. You’re here to feel and experience and interpret life.”
And, apparently, express those interpretations in every medium possible, with a minimum of artistic angst. “When something feels like homework, I’m out of there,” says Coupland. That can’t happen too often, judging by his output over the past 12 months: a biography of Marshall McLuhan, the opening of a Toronto park he helped design, a commission to create a monument in Ottawa honouring firefighters, the launch of a new clothing line for Roots, the unveiling of a new sculpture at the Vancouver Convention Centre, and now, Player One, which is already on the long list for the Giller Prize.
Exclusive excerpt from Player One
Rachel
Rachel is sitting at a bad computer in an airport hotel cocktail lounge with red plasticky walls and is contemplating leaving but decides to stay because she is on a mission, a mission that began because last winter, outside the kitchen, she heard her father say to her mother, “God, what a waste of a human life.”
“Ray, don’t talk like that. We need to find a way to get her to meet people. Maybe some men her age.”
“And then what—she’s going to get married and raise a happy family?”
“Ray, why are you even bringing this up?”
“I’m bringing this up because we never bring it up. No grandkids. No son-in-law. No nothing, just a robot forever, working in the garage eighteen hours a day . . . She has no sense of humour. Medically, clinically, scientifically, no sense of humour. And for that matter, no sense of irony or empathy or affection or—”
“I’m glad we’re talking about this. You think marriage is an option for her? You think her having a child would make everything better?”
“Frankly, I do. Never been kissed. Never will be kissed. Christ, how sad.”
“Stop!”
As a result of overhearing her father’s sentiments, Rachel has determined that her life’s mission is to bear children and thus prove to the world her value as a human being. She sees childbirth as a profoundly human act, and she would like to try to be human. She’s unsure why she was not allowed to be human, but she now sees a chance to make her move.
Growing up, she tried to make herself human. She researched what makes humans different from all other creatures, and all she learned was that only humans create art and music—elephants paint with brushes, but that somehow doesn’t count. And only humans tell jokes, only humans cook, only humans have an incest taboo, and only humans have ritual burials. Rachel dislikes and doesn’t understand music, because all it is is sounds; she doesn’t understand art, because all it is is scribbles and dribbles that don’t mesh with photographic reality; and she doesn’t understand humour or the notion of funniness—she only observes confusing braying-type sounds made by people after they hear something called “funny” (and usually after they’ve been drinking alcohol). However, from breeding white laboratory mice in the garage, she knows that an incest taboo is genetically useful, so she’s all for a taboo. And burial rituals strike her as smart, because they allow people to turn back into soil and be useful.
Identifying the unique threads of the human condition is not something Rachel approaches lightly, and she is not deceived into thinking that high technology is an activity that makes humans different: complex human activities such as enriching uranium, for example, are, by extension, elaborate means of generating heat and of fighting—and there’s nothing special to humans about that. Smashing atoms into quarks and leptons is high-tech, but if you think about it, it’s merely a way of creating incredibly tiny, expensive building bricks, and bricks make houses and birds make nests, so what’s special about that? Rachel once thought that attempts to contact alien species might constitute unique human behaviour, but it’s really no different than a wolf cub standing in the shrubs around a human fire, hoping to be asked to come closer and join a tribe of a different species. But music, art, and humour? Rachel has to take it on faith that these human qualities exist.
Rachel has never fit into the world. She remembers as a child being handed large wooden numbers covered in sandpaper to help her learn numbers and mathematics. Other children weren’t given tactile sandpaper number blocks, but she was, and she knows that she has always been a barely tolerated sore point among her neurotypical classmates. Rachel also remembers many times starving herself for days because the food that arrived at the table was the wrong temperature or colour, or was placed on the plate incorrectly: it just wasn’t right. And she remembers discovering single-player video games and for the first time in her life seeing a two-dimensional, non-judgmental, crisply defined realm in which she could be free from off-temperature food and sick colour schemes and bullies. Entering her screen’s portal into that other realm is where her avatar, Player One, can fully come to life. Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom; the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal.
