Douglas Coupland

Life After God

Colton Ray

You know when you read the right book at the right time and everything feels perfect? Yeah, this was that book for me. In today's world where our true emotions are always hidden behind five layers of irony (myself included) it was refreshing to read something so heartfelt and sincere and unconcerned with being "cool." I need to read more Coupland. If he thought modern life was vapid in 1994, I can't imagine how he would describe 2018.

Trever

One day later: Actually screw it this deserves five stars, I was hesitant because it's a harrowing experience to binge read the stories but they deserve all five. Also I forgot to mention that more than the gloom of OK Computer the stories reminded me of early Modest Mouse (pre-The Moon and Antarctica): there's driving on empty interstates and stuff, and the setting is the Pacific Northwest, and there's the sense of sadness with some sense that maybe, possibly, things could get better.

This was really good; the only reason it doesn't get 5 stars is because it's so depressing. That's not quite accurate; the sense that God and happiness could return lurks, but never appears. Perhaps this wasn't good to binge-read during a dark rainy morning.

Anyway, this thematically follows up from  Generation X, but strips away the humor and leaves you with the sincere desperation. It's very turn-of-the-century, in the mode of anxiety that I feel culminated in Radiohead's OK Computer and then with the 2000s faded away.

Life After God

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