19. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. New York: Reagan Books, 1995.

As a college senior, I thought a class called 'Literature and Digital Media' sounded like fun. I went to the first day, collected the syllabus and ran eagerly to the campus books store where I picked up a variety of novels based on the intersection of computers and literature. They ranged from Gibson's Neuromancer to Stephenson's Snow Crash and down to other much less notable books. It was the worst class I took in my entire college career.

The books, with a couple of exceptions, were poor specimens and the prof couldn't teach his way out of a preschool bathroom. I spent most of my time frothing at the mouth and picking apart the crappy writing. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not always looking for brilliant and elegantly written prose. If that's what I wanted I'd have gone and taken the class that required me beating my head against Faulkner, but I feel that there is a minimum requirement for quality.

In any case, we never got to Microserfs and the book got boxed up and sent to my apartment after graduation. Based on my experience with the majority of the course reading list, I had every intention of tossing it out when I came across it again about a year later. My erstwhile boyfriend fished it out of the trash, however, and subjected me to a 10 minute tirade on the innovative leaps of Mr. Coupland's brilliant mind. So I put it back on the shelf. I kept trying to get rid of it and various people kept convincing me to hold on to it.

So now I've read it. It's good. Really. It would be easy to lump Microserfs into Gen X office dramas, but that doesn't really cover it. It's sort of about being a geek, it's sort of about being a programmer after the first wave of programming hysteria, and it's sort of about people being people. What it's really about, though, is what it was to be a 20-something in the mid-90's tech culture. It's a snapshot. Everything changed and we're still catching up. Microserfs is the candid photo of a whole generation looking over its shoulder looking both exhilarated and terrified.

Technically speaking, Microserfs is written in the form of a journal our techie protagonist is keeping over the course of about two years. Most of it is pretty straight forward, but here and there Coupland blasts out free association pages and meme-like lists. While this isn't terribly distracting, I don't think it adds much. I think Coupland was trying to overlay a philisophical question about the nature of memory over the basic plot. The philosophical overtones don't add much and are pretty ignorable.

The pacing is pretty good, but this is definitely a momentum book. The first 100 pages really get the plot moving and then it slows down gradually all the way to the end. This is fine, as long as the book is read in a reletively short period. Pack it in your bag for your trip to Bermuda. Whatever you do though, don't put it down for more than a couple of days. Trust me. It's hard to pick it back up.