18 NOVEMBER 1995, Page 54

Fear the geeks even when they bring gifts

Tobias Jones

MICROSERFS by Douglas Coupland Flamingo, £9.99, pp. 371 The man who once branded his genera- tion with an impersonal X has now reduced literature to mere typescript. Douglas Coupland doesn't write prose, but insjead provides a print-out, self-consciously complete with spelling mistakes, different fonts, and lower cases. He even 'writes' a page of random symbols and letters, prefaced with the jovial observation, 'real language decomposes into encryption code'. So, like his previous novel, Generation X, this book is a sign of the times.

When in 1991 he published those 'tales of an accelerated culture', he spoke to the `twenty-somethings'. We understood his descriptions of `Mejobs' (slow money from fast food) and the general sense of `lessness'. His neologisms became standard jargon. He had captured precisely the manic pessimism of the Nineties.

Now, after two collections of rather vapid short stories, he has written another novel, equally attuned to the times, but now more meditative and strangely serene. Turning his attention to the feudal estab- lishments of the computer world, Coupland writes about the ‘geeks' and 'nerds' who toil in Silicon Valley and Seattle. Genera- tion X has grown up, plugged in, and found a job. The book evolves out of the diary of the central character, Dan. He taps his quirky thoughts and conversations into his 'power- book' when, as usual, he can't sleep at night. Dan and his friends work for the overlord, Bill, at Microsoft, and technology has permeated every pore of their lives; they sweat computer-culture. They have high incomes and low brows.

The members of this new generation have better relationships with their machines than with people. They meet deadlines rather than each other. The pace is frantic, but for no apparent purpose. The much-vaunted 'information-superhighway' seems suspiciously like a road to nowhere. As this realisation dawns, Dan (and compa- ny) get serious; they move on from Microsoft, and start having some frankly weird ideas.

But Dan (or rather Coupland) writes with much humour and intelligence, and it is his cultural acuity that makes the novel so very good. He laments the loss of history: 'I went shopping for memory this afternoon.' Everything seems arid: 'This is the end of the age of authenticity.' But he has an ability to distil the old into the very new. After all, that's all that Dan and his diary can do; like the video games and Las Vegas hotels he describes, he too plun- ders

extinct or mythical cultures in pursuit of a franchisable myth with graphic potential: Egypt — Camelot — the Jolly Roger.

Trying to make the machine more human, Dan provides his lap-top with a 'subcon- scious file', an eclectic grouping of words and phrases. The result, surprisingly lyrical, is what Coupland would probably call `post-industrial poetry'.

So words follow in the wake of technolo- gy, as Coupland again creates his own vocabulary; friends become 'software', whilst those who still lead a corporeal existence, sunning skin and building muscles, are from 'Planet Tan-fastic'. Frightening feminists are `chyx', and the `career-o-centric' computer programmers lack 'face-time'. If hip computer lingo is slicing up language, Coupland is at least observing its new arrangements.

He does at times strum the heart-strings a little too loudly, token family tragedies trying to give his work some gravitas: but mostly he smuggles in sentiment unnoticed, glimpsed only occasionally in the glow of a computer screen. He simply offers a `window' (as Microsoft would have it) on the world, and proves that lurking behind all the lard-drives' are a lot of soft hearts.

`Everything can be a metaphor for anything', writes Coupland. He has succeeded in making the ubiquitous computer a metaphor for metaphysical angst. Plus ca change, he suggests, plus c'est la meme chose. Serfdom is still with us, and, twisted through technology, so is great literature.