Epic Fail: The Failure of the Anthropostory in Douglas Coupland’s Post-Millennial Prose

The aim of the paper is to discuss the conceptualization of humanity’s planetary agency offered by a Canadian author, Douglas Coupland, in his three post-millennial novels: Generation A, Player One: What Is to Become of Us?, and Worst.Person.Ever. Exposing the egotism of what for years he has been calling humanity’s “Narrative Drive,” Coupland comments on the fallacies of the Anthropocene. Advocating the power of stories to act as models for approaching climate change in its hyperobjectivity, the three novels hint that unless people learn to story-tell-with other terran forces and agents, the anthropostory, which positions humans as the only active agents in a sequential narrative of conquest and destitution, is bound to come to an abrupt end.

Jim Rockford or Tony Soprano

Both in television shows such as The Rockford Files and The Sopranos and in the fiction of writers such as John Updike, Richard Ford, and Douglas Coupland, popular culture draws a distinction between Atlantic Coast and Pacific Coast suburbs. The differences revolve around two themes. The first concerns the roles of place and space. The second is the varying weight of history, often as manifested through families and social ties. Eastern suburbs and suburbanites are commonly depicted as embedded in place, rooted in time, and entangled in social networks. Western suburbs and suburbanites are often imagined as the opposite—isolated in space, atemporal, and free (or bereft) of social bonds.