Brasserie Max at the Covent Garden Hotel gives out onto bustling Monmouth Street and when I arrive early for a Saturday lunch with Douglas Coupland he is already there at a window table, eyes quick to the shuffle outside, ever alert to the zeitgeist. Coupland is one of the great observers of our jump-cut world; his antennae for new ironies twitch constantly. It’s 20-odd years since he made his name, at 30, with Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the era-nailing novel that seemed to be written entirely in aphorism. Since that defining moment, he has never stopped trying to keep up with that attention-deficit consumer culture he projected, even as it has gone further into digital fast-forward.
Our lunch is a jolly tour of current preoccupations. Before we order Coupland has already navigated between these sentences: “I have not thought of Albania in a year. What are they up to?”, “I’m currently trying to organise an Infinite Jest-athon in Vancouver,” and “You know that men over 35 make their biggest online purchases between 11 and midnight? It’s like: ‘Hey, I’ll buy a boat’”.
He apologises briefly for his appearance – “I was in Berlin for a week then I got here Monday. I am at that two-week mark of living out of a suitcase where everything is a bit shaggy looking”, though in a pale linen jacket and bold shirt he looks the picture of neat – and gives me a précis of the trip so far. He stayed at the Soho House in Berlin, a hotel of “uncanny genius”. “You walk in and they are playing your playlist, then you get into your room and you think this could be my room, and then something dawns on you like: ‘this could be Watership Down, they know too much’”.
In London he is staying at the Ace in Shoreditch, which is “crazy-trendy, 26-and-a-half-year-olds with their MacBook Pros. In every corner someone is sending audio files. Everyone alone together. That is the thing that has really surprised me about technology: that people want to be quite as connected as they do.”
Does he switch off?
“I do. I don’t like being lassoed by my phone. But then the downside to that is forgetting your phone altogether. It’s like you have had a brain amputation. I sometimes have that feeling when I am walking down a street – when I’m not listening to something, it’s like – ‘I am just walking and that is all I am doing.’ You feel vaguely guilty or not in tune with the times.”
Coupland orders a mozzarella and tomato starter, the schnitzel, and a second black coffee. He is somewhat affronted by my own selection of parma ham and figs as a starter and salmon to follow. “Oh I see! You are having a worthy meal. Why not just have a couple of grapes and be done?”
He tells me about a brief period in his very early writing career, when he was a restaurant reviewer for a paper in his native Vancouver. The shame of it now is that a couple of the restaurants in Gastown still have his juvenile efforts in large type in the window, prompting friends to remark: “I didn’t know you still found time to do these kinds of things, Doug.” He mentions how he feels dinner party conversation has been undone by the death of the urban legend, since there is always some killjoy there “who can pull out a phone and look things up”. And then he recalls his strangest meal of recent memory, at a half-demolished Mexican restaurant in Arizona on a kind of island between freight-lines where they sold prescription drugs out of buckets. The son of an air force doctor, Coupland grew up never travelling without antibiotics. He bought a sack full of amoxicillin but thought better of it at the border and ditched it in a skip. “This mozzarella is completely awesome!” he says, in passing.
Coupland is a man of projects. The last year has orbited around two, which share obsessions: a large-scale retrospective of his mostly conceptual art in Vancouver, which is supported by an erudite coffee-table catalogue Everywhere is Anywhere is Everything is Anything, and a compulsive journalistic book in search of the global wiring of the internet, and the largely unknown company Alcatel-Lucent that keeps its tetrabytes humming.
The largest schnitzel I have ever seen is placed in front of him, and he goggles briefly, before looking mock-askance at my modest salmon portion.
I’m realising that he has never had to hunt for that elusive zeitgeist, it just follows him around. Mention of Ebola prompts a story about his public statue Gumhead, a large sculptural self-portrait, to which passers-by in Vancouver have been invited to stick their chewing gum. About a quarter of a million pieces of gum have been stuck to it, morphing his profile – but at one point a curious thing happened, he suggests: the eyes now appear to be bleeding, prompting some to make a miraculous connection to the best-known symptom of the virus.
Coupland is no stranger to pandemic. “I was in Toronto for Sars,” he says, gamely tackling his gargantuan schnitzel. “I was on a book tour. The American oncological association had booked the hotel but – shamefully, because of the panic - they cancelled en masse, so I had the strange experience of being the only guest there. It was like I was in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Everywhere I went there was a guy saying: ‘Hello, Mr Coupland, can I help you?’”
Coupland believes some of the best writing in the English language today is being done in the one-star reviews on TripAdvisor. “They aren’t allowed to swear, so they have to be extremely inventive in their attack.” He wonders, though, about the future of the novel. “I mean my attention span is gone. If anyone tells me that theirs hasn’t, I just assume they are lying. So what does writing mean in that environment?”
Talking of his show and the accompanying book, I suggest it felt a bit like an autobiography – there is, for example a great “Canada Room”, all tartan sofas and outdoorsy intent.
Coupland agrees it is a kind of memoir. “I didn’t like going through it when other people were there because it felt like people were walking inside my head,” he says. “The Canada room was basically to perplex and confuse Americans. It’s a reminder that Canada is the country they were supposed to be, before they made all the weird decisions.”
For a long time Canada has seemed the ideal vantage from which to view the excesses of American consumerism, for Coupland to coin his ideas of McJobs and Bambification and Dorian Graying and the rest. These days he fears even America is peripheral.
“I was in São Paulo recently, 21 million people and it just does go on for ever and it creates this real existential vertigo – I mean: ‘Why are we all here? What are we working toward?’” A menu is proferred at that moment. Coupland doesn’t eat dessert, and neither do I today, so we have another coffee.
“I am in Chile quite regularly,” he says. “Friends have a place there. The Chileans pride themselves as being uncorrupted, and there is a great sense of solidarity -– which is all paid for by Chinese copper money. I take a Stephen King novel and a historical biography that will not contain mentions of televisions or mobile phones. It is like temporal tourism; it feels like California in 1910. I do three weeks and then I want to go back to this.”He looks around Brasserie Max. We are hemmed in on all sides by ladies who lunch. “The mobile device factor in here is very low,” Coupland says. Chat levels are high – “but at least it’s not a hen party: that is one of the scariest things I have ever seen. I was in Soho near Piccadilly one night and women were puking and beating up on each other. I mean: what happened here?”
He looks out of the window. “This is a city of 28-year-olds,” he says. “Everyone has a 3pm face. They have done their first and second wave of shopping and are wondering when it will end.”
Coupland, though, has no such concerns, he checks his watch, thanks me for giving him a “happy lunch head” and hurries off to an appointment with an audience at the Whitechapel Gallery, to talk about the future, and its uneven spread.
Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything is out now (Black Dog, £24.95). Click here to buy it from Guardian Bookshop for £18.71
