End of the world as he knows it

Generation X author in town for Convocation Hall shindig on the heels of Giller Prize nomination by

DOUGLAS COUPLAND’S latest novel, Player One, presents a doomsday scenario set in a Toronto hotel, a building resembling “the third-best restaurant in the fourth-largest city in Bulgaria.”

No, being stuck in an airport hotel is not the apocalypse of which he writes. The cataclysmic social upheaval is actually triggered by skyrocketing gas prices in the time of a severe oil shortage.

But while all hell breaks loose — there are explosions and all manner of mayhem — the story itself is remarkably subdued as Coupland focuses on four characters: the hotel’s alcoholic bartender, a pastor who stole $20,000 from his church, an autistic 17- year-old girl and a 40-year-old woman waiting to meet an Internet suitor.

Long-listed for the prestigious Giller Prize, Player One also has the honour of being the subject of the 2010 CBC Massey Lectures. Coupland will present his novel in a series of five lectures in Vancouver, Regina, Charlottetown, Ottawa and Toronto, which will take place on Oct. 29 at 8 p.m. at Convocation Hall.

The lectures will be recorded and then broadcast on the CBC Radio the week of Nov. 8.

Coupland, best-selling novelist, visual artist and popularizer of such terms as Generation X and McJob, prefers to conduct interviews via e-mail, most likely because it allows him to answer questions from his Vancouver home at 2 in the morning in his pyjamas.

Q: Congratulations on being long listed for the Giller. How did you receive the news and what was your reaction?

A: I opened my e-mail box and saw about 20 e-mails saying “congratulations,” and I thought maybe I’d won a barbecue.

Q: How did the idea for Player One come about?

A: I wanted to take everything I’ve ever done and squish it into a diamond,the way Superman can take anything and crush it into a diamond. There were a lot of persistent ideas in my work, and I really needed to once and for all put them into a final logic.

Q:What was the process and challenge of adapting the novel for the lecture format?

A: I’m a terrible teacher. I’m disciplined but I have no patience. The only students I’d ever care about would be those one or two live wires you get in any class. I’d just tell the others to go knit or play Scrabble and give them a C+. So I’m not a good lecturer, and doing a traditional lecture was pointless. So I had to figure out a new way of knitting ideas together and putting them forward.

Q: How do you feel that Player One comes across in book form versus lecture?

A: I went to see Wade Davis’s lecture last year, and he’s an astonishing lecturer — because that’s what he does for a living! And good on him! As a non-lecturer,I had to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t.

Q:According to a Quill & Quire article, you have said that Player One “presents a wide array of modes to view the mind, the soul, the body, the future, eternity, technology, and media.”

A: I did.

Q: Doug, I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind expanding on that and explaining what that means?

A: Barrett, I think we’re at a crisis point as a species, and we need to articulate the types and depths of our crisis. It’s not just about pollution or greenhouse gases or war. It’s about how we have to somehow modify our cortical structures or our DNA as a species.There’s really no hope otherwise. I mean, are we going to be making photocopies and going to Starbucks in 500 years? 5,000 years? No.We’ll either be dead or we’ll have mutated forward, hopefully electively forward.

Q: Setting aside your “me goggles,” which you defined in the New York Times as “the inability to accurately perceive oneself as others do,” how do you think people perceive you?

A: I have no idea. I used to care. The moment I stopped caring, life got so much easier.

Q: What is your fascination with the end of the world?

A: It’s not a fascination with the end of the world. It’s a fascination with using endgame scenarios to shock us into facing how unstable our everyday reality is — not just ecologically but in all other ways.

Q:What is your favorite T.O. memory?

A: I have so many. I really love the city and it’s my second home. Probably it was a rainy day in fall of 1988, maybe 5:30, outside the Davisville subway station, and the rain had stopped and the sun was washing in red across the western horizon, and I had this moment where the larger part of myself said to all the smaller parts of myself that I was to become a full-time writer, and that if I were to do this, I’d have to write fiction because it’s a pure and crystalline form of writing. This isn’t something I was expecting at the age of 28. I knew I was going to have to give up everything I’d achieved at that point and throw it all away and start from scratch.

Q:What are your favorite places to visit and eat when you’re here?

A: I like that bar at the Hyatt where they have those fantastically out-of-date caricatures of (mostly) dead Canadian writers. It’s the skull that sits on the desk staring at you while you write.

 

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