SOURCE: “Trouble in Paradise,” in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 7, No. 313, July 29, 1994, p. 39.

In the following review of Life After God, Mannes-Abbott summarizes the issues raised in Coupland's work.

A couple of years and novels separate Douglas Coupland and Jim Lewis, while a couple of words describe their projects here. They are both books about the possibility of and the necessity for New Edens: oases for desert life. Like a number of American writers over the past decade, from Easton Ellis, Janowitz and McInerney to Cooper and Tillman, their point of departure is the blankest of blank pages. Both books are written against the affectless prose that has often filled it.

It was Coupland whose Generation X gave an impressively sharp voice to the over-educated, under-employed and under-awed children of the 1960s. Shampoo Planet followed and continued to revel in noisy “Time, with its grand, unfightable sweep … foaming...