Review: Worst. Person. Ever. - Douglas Coupland

How did it come to this? How did Douglas Coupland go from being one of the sharpest, most satirical minds in the literary world to end up writing like a bad parody of John Niven’s Twitter feed? Maybe it’s the nature of technology that those who seek to analyse it in their work end up sounding like they’ve been chewed up and spat out by it. Philip K Dick spent the last years of his life in a state of extreme paranoia, basically believing himself to be a character in a Philip K Dick novel; in JPod (2006), Coupland has one character say to another ‘that’s the sort of thing that would happen in a Douglas Coupland novel’. Worse, on page 342 of that novel, Coupland himself puts in an appearance, ‘taking photos of abandoned factories as an art project’. It’s pretty much been all downhill from there.

This latest venture started out as an attempt to revive the Chinese art of biji, a form of storytelling which tends to be episodic, featuring 'believe-it-or-not' style anecdotes, originally intended to be published by McSweeney’s. (I know, a washed-up author revives an ancient Chinese literary style on the say-so of Dave Eggers. It’s the sort of thing that would happen in a Douglas Coupland novel). Told in the worst person singular, the story follows Raymond Gunt (GUNT!), a TV cameraman, on a twat’s progress from his squalid West London flat to a tropical island, via a series of arrests, kidnappings, seductions, binges and brawls. He fancies himself as as quite the urbane man-about-town (his interior monologue references Jason Bourne and Proust in the opening chapter). The reality is somewhat less impressive, as he finds himself constantly outmanouevred by his sidekick, a homeless man called Neal.

In literary terms, the closest comparison I can think of is Cunt, the fake documentary series invented by Charlie Brooker for the TV Go Home website, which launched the career of Nathan Barley. You get the streams of invective popularised by Brooker and later by Malcolm Tucker (nothing is ever bad news – it has to be ‘a searing hot kebab of vasectomy leftovers drizzled in donkey jizz’), the same utterly dysfunctional relationship between character and creator. Sadly, what you don’t get is the brevity of Brooker’s programme descriptions, or indeed the variety offered by the other writing that was posted alongside them. 

Also lacking is the sense of daring that is required by any decent satire. There may be some poor benighted souls who still believe that commercial television is populated by philanthropic, hard-working and sober souls who just want to help us expand our horizons, but I would suggest that not many of them will be reading Douglas Coupland novels. In the absence of edgy subject material, the only option left is to pile on the shock factor. Thus, we get chapter 25, in which an atomic bomb is dropped and the main character shits himself. Where does a novel go from there? Unfortunately for us, it goes to another thirty chapters, each more desperate than the last. 

The problems of Worst. Person. Ever. are legion. Aside from the general lack of imagination, there is carelessness (British characters use words like ‘sidewalk’), imagery that makes no sense (one character’s ‘council estate accent was like three raccoons trapped in a Dumpster’) and terrible dialogue. In Coupland-world, airport check-in staff say things like 'the checks and barriers we normal - sorry, statistically average - people use to keep a scrim between society and us' on a disturbingly regular basis. There's no need to be realistic, but the author has to make suspension of disbelief seem like an attractive and worthwhile proposition. This writing is more farcical than fantastical, his characters are blank archetypes; the format of the book clearly precludes any sense of redemption of development. In The Quiddity of Will Self, Sam Mills remarks that ‘characters will always use sub-text. Only the mad have an uncensored connection from mind to mouth’. In this novel, everyone does – no character has an inner life or hidden motive, so instead the plot is propelled along by the sort of deus ex machina normally found in the works of Dan Brown (The US Army! Cannibals!)

The much-missed British music journalist Steven Wells published a novel called Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty (1999), which featured, among other things, the spectacle of Princess Diana being resurrected and slaughtered on a weekly basis to satisfy the British public’s twin cravings for public displays of grief and vengeance. While Wells wrote with the same hype-up-to-eleven style that Coupland employs here, he also managed to confront the reader with some genuinely challenging ideas and showed a breathtaking lack of regard for taboo. For all its bad language and disreputable behaviour, Worst. Person. Ever. is mild by comparison in all the areas that matter. There are running jokes about bestiality, eating insects, airline food (hello, the Nineties? Would you like your observational comedy back? We seem to have got it by mistake) and nut allergies, none of which would be out of place in an American teen comedy, but all of which should be out of place in a Douglas Coupland novel.

Is Raymond Gunt (GUNT!) the worst person ever? No, he’s not nearly bad enough for this to really work. The novel is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. If Gunt (oh, I can’t be bothered anymore) were real, he’d probably end up with a couple of weeks’ coverage in the tabloids and a reality show on channel 4000. This is just Coupland poking fun at something that has already lapsed into self-parody. Maybe it was quite enjoyable to write. To read? Not so much.