SOURCE: "'X' Marks the Schlock: Slacking Towards Bethlehem with Author Douglas Coupland," in Vanity Fair, Vol. 57, No. 3, March, 1994, pp. 92, 94.

In the following negative review, Handy focuses on the theme of spiritual crisis in Coupland's Life after God.

Is this what our scary Judeo-Christian God has come to, Abraham's fearsome taskmaster nudging 28-year-olds through the postcollege blues, the Gospels' mighty Redeemer transubstantiated into Prozac for Pacific Northwestern slackers?

That is the impression left by Douglas Coupland's new book, Life After God … a collection of eight stories that mean to form a commentary on spiritual crisis as it is experienced by underemployed twenty- and early-thirtysome-things. This will be familiar terrain for those who have read Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, a novel that introduced the titular term to the language and became a campus best-seller, the Trout Fishing in America of the early 90s. By turns clever...