The most significant touchstone for Coupland’s work, however, is easy to miss, and comes late in the Brentwood essay. Polaroids from the DeadBy Douglas CouplandHarper Perennial208 pp; $18.95When Polaroids from the Dead was published in mid-1996, it was considered a departure for Douglas Coupland. In those few paragraphs, little more than a page, Coupland’s work reshapes itself, taking on an urgency beneath the clever sound bites, a clarity beyond the wit. Twenty years later, and even taking into account the various turns and surprises of Coupland’s career, Polaroids from the Dead remains an outlier within a canon of outliers. But as a fresh re-reading makes clear, it isn’t that Polaroids is at odds with Coupland’s work; rather, it perfectly encapsulates the contradictions at the heart of it.

Source: National Post July 08, 2016 19:07 UTC