Books like Life After God

There's an obvious problem with a 5-star rating system (or any graded system, really) being used to rate god-damned BOOKS, you know? This has probably been brought up previously, but c'mon: I'm going to validate Virginia Woolf by giving her 5 stars, and also I really fucking loved Harry Potter so you know what, that's 5 stars too, so Harry Potter's 5 stars is on the same level as Woolf's 5 stars. And Comedy of Errors is only 4 stars, as is the entirety of Milton's work, but Trumpet of the Swan, which holds a special place in my heart since I read it like a dozen times when I was 10 years old, is 5 stars. And somehow these all exist in the same ratings universe? I mean really now.Does 3 stars mean you shouldn't read it? Do you have to read all the 5-star books first, because they're the best? I don't know if anyone really thinks this, but still. The greatest works of art are going to be distinctly flawed in some way, represented by their limitations as much as their transcendent qualities, and it is of course our experience with that piece of art that matters most; a dynamic & breathing thing, largely independent of how pristine the work itself is.I'm not sure why this tirade is coming up in my first write-up of Douglas Coupland's work, except for this: This is a distinctly flawed book, and it is far from his "best" work in many ways (Microserfs is an easy favorite, for me) and in many ways Coupland's work is distinctly flawed as a whole. Well fuck it, it's supposed to be. He writes about flawed people living in a flawed world saturated by monumentally flawed popular culture. This is his stake in the matter. As a writer he is one of the most vivid stylists working today, and his style is pared down and simple and funny and dire and deadpan, and in my own mental bookshelf I usually catalog him near Dennis Johnson, only less dire (keep in mind, "less dire than Dennis Johnson" is like saying "less devastating than the Black Plague"). I think Coupland's work actually comes out of some of the same territory as something like Zippy the Pinhead, only without the supersaturation of Discordian philosophy -- it recognizes a landscape dominated by disposable culture, and neither revels in it or reviles it, but instead takes a straight Buddhist approach, accepting it as spiritual matter because it is there, the way the mountains or rivers are there; Coupland is on the spearhead of writers grappling with spirituality in late-stage capitalism, as the Plastic Age turns mercilessly into the Electronic Age. Mr. Coupland's generation is staunchly on the seam between these two ages, it should be noted.Oh yeah, the book itself: Coupland is a writer to binge on -- to read five or 10 or all of his books back-to-back -- and I think Life After God is a wonderful place to start. In a way this is a perfect book, because in most published versions it is a tiny pocket-sized experiment that you can read in a few hours, with large print and wonderful little drawings on many of the pages. It is a reminder of the difference between BOOKS and NOVELS, and clearly here Douglas Coupland has made a BOOK about the strange, thin, center-space in the ven diagram of consumerism and spirituality. All his books are like that, maybe, but Life After God is pared down to the essentials.Let me try to say something more substantial about the book then: I think the question at the core of Life After God is how humans find themselves in a culture that has accelerated past the point where humans actually can experience it -- what then, are we left with, and how do we find religious experience in this shell? It's easy to forget, given how annoying generational stereotypes are, that there was a philosophy of very real, very powerful despair & disillusionment at the core of Generation X's bleak slacker ethos. The feeling here is that the vibrant, blind optimism of shiny happy people has left behind anyone who stopped to actually think about things, sort of like a hitchhiker left by the side of the road in a swirling of discarded McDonald's cups & glamor magazines. 'We are what is left,' seems to be the mantra -- 'good riddance to the rest of you, but now what?'Because of the crass nihilism that is so typically ascribed to Gen-X folks, I'm going to say this: the most daring and interesting and wonderful part of this book is the part where the narrator admits that he believes in God; that he really does think of a higher power that might be lurking behind the North American wasteland he's wandering. Its a totally unexpected moment, and it goes against the sort of staunch atheistic impulses that are tied to the laziest forms of spiritualism through commerce. Coupland's books have a strange magic to them, and they seem as essential to the past 20 years as any art I've encountered.