I really loved this book

Great writing style, but does drag on a bit. Quite emotional at times, but also very boring at others.

What a terrific sophomore novel from an author who describes the human condition with such precision that I find myself taking a lot of notes when I read his work. I find that Douglas Coupland novels often open the door to rich comedic and soulful discussion with close friends. It astounds me how he achieves both, especially at a time when too much is about the constant, exhausting clever quip.

pretty good!

Smart and well-groomed
I've read almost all Douglas Coupland's novels more or less in the order of their publication, but had inadvertently omitted this, his second. (Looking at some of the reviews in here, others appear to have missed it as well - perhaps it's been overshadowed by its predecessor, the classic Generation X .) Picking it up to read today is like stepping back in time; it was written in 1992 - that is, before the rise of the Internet - which, since it's a story which builds on teen culture, fashion and consumerism, makes it feel like it comes from another era.

That said, I enjoyed reading this tale of smart, well-groomed Tyler Johnson as he strove to come of age in an undistinguished, decaying American town, with his loving but eccentric family and his witty, flawed friends (both invariant features in much of Coupland's fiction), his neat, clever girlfriend and the emotional fall-out from his summer's trip to Europe. The use of paired adjectives in this sentence echoes Coupland's descriptive style as well - you sometimes feel that his books would be halved in length if his editor capriciously disallowed the use of simile (e.g., "the Pacific sunset [...] like shrink-wrapped, exotic vegetables", "a feeling at once destructive, romantic and grand - like falling into a swimming pool dressed in a tuxedo" [both on p5]). This story has rather more character development than some of his others (or at least, as far as I can remember), and I was pleased to fill in this gap in my experience of his canon.

Originally reviewed 6 October 2014

This story is kind of sad, and the protagonist is kind of a bad person but I still felt bad for him in the end.
I liked how the story accurately depicted Los Angeles as the shithole that it is.

Sorry, couldn't finish it. Too irrelevant? Outdated?

I stumbled across this book because of the song by Panic at the Disco which is named after a sentence from this book - I write sins not tragedies.

Good read, good character development of the main character.

Re-read this 32 years after it was written and still loved it. It was so "of a time" it felt like a current, modern critique at the time. It had aged into the time capsule I'm sure Coupland intended it to be.
Reading it now is like finding a long-forgotten flavour of popsicle in the back of the freeze (to use the author's style on his own work). The flavour is an intense punch of something you loved, but your tasted have changed and it's just so saturated that you almost can't enjoy it because it is so much itself.
Reading this in my 40s, vs my late teens, knowing how the 90's, 00's and 10's all played out, learning how the internet changed everything... but Coupland is a futurist, so short of including a pandemic his vision was pretty accurate.

I stopped reading Doug's works after it just got too apocalyptic and we start to see hints of that in this book.

Reading this today is a trip to a theme park of my youth.

I'm not really sure what the point of this book is. Not that every book has to have a point but after finishing it I'm left wondering what actually happened and was there any point in writing it? I'm sure there are people out there who identify with the over stereotyped and yet bland characters, perhaps I'm reading this in the wrong era but it did nothing for me.

I remember liking Coupland more when I was younger. It was ok

Jesus, f*cking Christ ! That book was nothing of what is promised and I'm highly disappointed. The only good thing about it was the letter of Jasmine to Tyler and that was 2,5 pages out of 282. What a waste of time. It did not age well, that book, among other drawbacks. I doesn't get one star only because it kept me interested enough in where the f the story is going to actually finish it. And regret it.