A measure of a great writer is the way he or she changes the way we talk and think about literature, almost through force of personality. Douglas Coupland has not yet forced one of these changes, and I am perplexed. He is on an incredible creative roll. His last four novels - Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma, Miss Wyoming and now this, All Families Are Psychotic - are so good and so distinctive that they seem to me to mark a genuine seismic shift in the literary landscape. Could it be that not everyone is as convinced of Coupland's brilliance as I am?
Perhaps Coupland's problem is that his books are too difficult for many critics. A follower of the theories of Harold Bloom, for instance, would read Coupland's books for signs of anxious sparring with his literary predecessors. The problem is, Coupland does not seem to have these anxieties. He is so relaxed that his work evades one of the most favoured tools of contemporary scholarship.
One could go further and argue that Coupland's novels do not engage with literary history in any shape or form, anxious or otherwise. In the course of a criticism of younger writers, Martin Amis recently said that he wanted to feel there was a lot of "reading" behind a piece of writing. With Coupland, one rarely gets this feeling. His novels do not emerge from a literary tradition; they emerge from contemporary culture, in the widest sense. Coupland is Canadian, and is particularly good on the idea of being half-American, a category that includes everyone now living, except for those unlucky enough to be all-American.
At heart, All Families Are Psychotic is the story of a mother-son relationship. Wade returns from years of wandering and stops at a bar, where he is picked up by a young woman. Shortly after, he discovers that this woman is his father's new wife. Later, at his mother's home, the father storms in and shoots Wade. The bullet passes through Wade's liver and hits the mother. The clincher is that Wade is HIV-positive, and now both his mother and his father's new wife are, too. And Wade's sister is just about to become the first thalidomide astronaut.
This is high melodrama: divorce, dysfunction, inter-generational sex, marital infidelity, life-threatening illnesses (everyone has at least one) and spacemen. But Coupland does not tell it in the florid, intense style of the melodrama queen. The tone is rather cool and slow, almost like a song played a beat behind the bar. Nevertheless, as melodrama, it involves a certain dancing with cliches. Again, Amis, the last example in Britain of a great writer who forced a change on the literary landscape, has made the war on cliche his special cause. Coupland's use of cliche extends even to dialogue: it is well controlled but, through their language, his characters connect with the world of soap operas and pop lyrics. Perhaps this is another way in which Coupland makes himself unreadable. If his characters had a more stylish turn of phrase, then they would have a more obvious place within a literary tradition.
But this assumes that literature is a linguistic art, rather than a dramatic one. The truth is that it is both. I believe this is where Coupland is at his most sophisticated. The characters in his last four novels, and especially All Families Are Psychotic, are forced to engage with soap-style plots, but are not themselves soap characters. Like the rest of us in this half-American, TV-mediated world, his characters recognise that there is a tension between the way they would react in situations and the way that they know the characters in TV or film dramas would react. The resulting tone is rather dreamlike: characters are aware that they can sleepwalk through their lives, giving the responses that we are all accustomed to expect. But they also feel another imperative: to be active dreamers and to discover their own genuine reactions.
This leads to the most problematic section of All Families Are Psychotic: the discovery, in the last few chapters, of a cure for Aids. The cure is so simple that it risks being platitudinous. This recalls other moments in Coupland's novels, particularly the moment in Girlfriend in a Coma when the world suddenly becomes perfect. As we later discover, this perfect world is a kind of shared dream. If these strange twists have become a signature style for Coupland, I believe they are also a part of an adventurous exploration of narrative. Coupland recognises that drama has two opposing roles. The audience wants a roller coaster of dramatic conflicts, but it also wants simple wish-fulfilment. This is what we do when we tell ourselves stories in dreams: we smooth things out.
Coupland's non-anxious, behind-the-beat style is, in the end, deceptive. It follows the mood and tempo of the dreamer. At the same time, Coupland's dreamscape is not distinguishable from our own contemporary culture with all of its anxieties. In fact, Coupland is careful to set all his novels in the year they are written, so that his oeuvre provides a history of the changes in contemporary culture. This amounts to an exciting literary project, but one that, despite Coupland's popularity with readers, does not seem to be getting the respect it deserves. As a Canadian, Coupland is eligible for the Booker Prize, but I have never heard anyone even idly mention his name in connection with the award.
I still believe a literary shift is on the horizon. Many of the elements that I appreciate in Coupland are also found in the works of Haruki Murakami: the strange tempo, the depiction of the contemporary, the unexpected twists, the use of dreams. If, in the end, a new kind of literature carries the name Murakami rather than Coupland, it does not matter. The work, and the spirit behind it, does.
Nicholas Blincoe is co-editor of All Hail the New Puritans (Fourth Estate, £6.99)
