Eleanor Rigby, Girlfriend in a Coma… Novels based on pop songs? I looked at the shelf wondering if the librarian had recommended Coupland only because she knew I had checked out Bret Easton Ellis, who refers to pop songs a lot as well.
I couldn’t think of a song called Miss Wyoming, so I chose it first. Within a few months, I’d also read Eleanor Rigby and Girlfriend in a Coma.
Coupland shares Easton Ellis’s fascination with pop songs and the twenty-something turn-of-the-millennium, pampered characters, but the tone of the books is wildly different. I can imagine the same demographic of reader liking both authors, in the same way that the same demographic of readers might like Office Space and Fight Club. The similarities, though, have more to do with presentation and style than substance.
Coupland’s books are sort of cute, in a hip Canada-centric sort of way. They may not take you out of your underlying depression, but at least they’ll make angst seem not quite so bad.
Of the three I’ve read, I liked Eleanor Rigby the most. Girlfriend in a Coma was too preachy, like the slow chapters in a Nick Hornby book.
