Book 60: Miss Wyoming

Miss Wyoming
Douglas Coupland

Coupland is unmistakably himself in Miss Wyoming, and readers familiar with his characters and their unwavering mission to find and make meaning in their lives will recognize plenty in this book, though its style is divergent from Coupland's work at large. Due perhaps to these small differences, Miss Wyoming is not as immediately effective as much of Coupland's other work; its beginning seems rather staged and almost too Coupland-esque before the story develops its razor-sharp insights and cynically funny lines. Exploring a third-person point of view instead of the usual first, the book follows many narrative threads deftly, beginning in the present and slowly working backward across several intertwined and diverging timelines but without leading readers too far astray. The ping-pong plot could have caused fierce whiplash but instead the narrative slowly develops across the quick chapters and characters just introduced and almost tangential to the plot receive their close-ups, deserved instead of distracting. The larger scope of the narrative as it bounces between characters and locations serves as an appropriate backdrop for Coupland's familiar zeitgeist-chasing probing into the lives of the disenchanted. Though some of the territory is familiar and the plot a bit outlandish and, despite the novel's overall solid construction, difficult to grapple firmly at times, Miss Wyoming is a worthy addition to the Coupland canon if not his strongest, most evocative book.

Grade: B+