author: Douglas Coupland

name: Steev

average rating: 3.54

book published: 2010

rating: 4

read at: 2012/01/21

date added: 2012/01/21

shelves: novels, fun, own-it, after-the-fall

review:
This book reminds me of Generation X, Coupland's first novel, which I read when i came out just about exactly 20 years ago. Like Generation X, it's full of characters who most of the time don't do much but are full of profound thoughts. All the characters are similarly smart and introspective and philosophical, and their thoughts are super super interesting. In this, Coupland's writing is pretty unrealistic, as I don't believe very many people really are this way. But I think much of his fiction is not meant to be realistic, but more of simply and excuse for him to expound on a variety of interesting ideas he has. This is pretty much how my fiction is as well, whenever I try to write fiction now, and that makes me realize that Generation X probably had a very large influence on my writing, as well as just my thinking and worldview in general.

It's a small book. It's not extremely ambitious, and it succeeds in what it sets out to do. Right on the cover it says "a novel in 5 hours", and that's precisely what it is, in terms of the story it tells (5 hours of several people in a cocktail lounge dealing with the chaos that happens when crude oil suddenly rises to 900 bucks a barrel) - although many of the concepts it covers are eternal. For that, it's impressive, and the small story is still just gripping enough to have made me keep reading it, very quickly.

The only really unfortunate thing about the book is that the last 30 pages are a strange sort of glossary, which is somewhat anti-climactic and and redundant. The glossary basically defines a lot of the ideas in the book, as a sort of geeky coined-phrase list, but most of the ideas were pretty thoroughly explored and explained in the novel itself. It makes me think that Coupland probably wanted to include these definitions in the text as little sidebars, just like in Generation X, and this would have certainly been better, but perhaps the design budget for this book was not enough to make that possible, so they slapped them on at the end.

Anyway, people who like to think about death, God, Peak Oil, the end of the world, love, autism, and/or the Internet will all probably find something to love in Player One.