SOURCE: A review of Life after God, in Paragraph, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 32-3.

In the following review, Burnham offers a mixed assessment of Life after God, stating that "what is most interesting and important about Coupland's work is how it functions as an ideological text."

Generation X is not just a novel by Douglas Coupland; nor is it a generation; nor is it a way of thinking about the economic and social changes that have purportedly marginalized the children of the North American bourgeoisie. Generation X is all of these things, which is to say that it is simultaneously the ideology, the text(s), and the demographic social formation. So I think it's important to read Coupland's work, in this case his new short-story collection Life After God, in such a shifting context.

The title of the book is a pun: while Coupland's premise is that his...