Douglas Coupland has always been a clever observer of human behavior and a master of quirky subtext. However, his latest novel, Miss Wyoming (Pantheon), in which Coupland takes on Hollywood, misses no opportunity to veer toward the obvious and cliché, beginning with the book's central characters.
John Johnson is a past-his-prime movie producer who, upon returning home from a self-imposed Hollywood exile and walkabout, is struggling to put his life back in order, and to find meaning somewhere in the stunning superficiality of the entertainment biz.
His not-so-distant past is a dissolute life of high-priced whores, prescription drugs, paranoia, and giant piles of blow. In fact, let's not beat around the bush: Coupland ripped off the late Don Simpson (producer of Top Gun, Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop) whole cloth as his male protagonist, right down to creating his own fictional version of Simpson's real-life partner Jerry Bruckheimer.
Simpson, whoops, Johnson, bumps into Susan Colgate – a beautiful actress a few turns of the clock past her 15 minutes of fame – at a movie industry power lunch. They hit it right off because, well, they have something in common: Both have pulled mysterious disappearing acts.
Johnson just walked into the sunset and vanished until he turned up half-dead in the desert; and Colgate, it seems, was in a plane crash a few years back and had been presumed dead until, a year later, she walked into a police station in the Midwest. Colgate is Jon Benet Ramsey grown up. She's resentful of her evil stage mother (imagine!) and philosophical about her lack of silver screen status.
The engines are revved for a Hollywood love story when suddenly Colgate vanishes again. Johnson, who just met this woman yesterday, pulls out all the stops to find her.
This could be the exciting tension of the novel, but the book loses itself jumping back and forth in time, and devoting way too much energy to the background story of Colgate's years as a child beauty pageant contestant, Johnson's sickly childhood, their respective disappearances, etc.
Coupland's descriptions of Susan's screwy childhood and Johnson's Hollywood bigshot years are fun enough. They're filled with great side plots and clever turns of phrase. But in the end, it's hard to get away with from the fact that we're really reading a story about how two people with some sexual chemistry get from first date to second date, with a bunch of zany antics in between. It seems almost as if we're expected to be so stunned that people in Hollywood have actual feelings that we won't notice the lack of any real progress in the novel.
There's not a lot of action in most of Coupland's books, but he makes it up to you with piercing insight into his subject, whether that be the corporate culture of Microsoft, the searching kids of Gen X, or his own personal sorrow over divorce.
Not this time, though. There is no culture in America crying out more than Hollywood for some piercing insight, but Coupland's portrayal of the industry is as flat as a cardboard James Bond cutout.
