This chapter explores the evolving representation of religious belief in Coupland's work via three connected areas of discussion. The first section locates his fiction in the wider context of the apparent ‘sacred turn’ in contemporary culture. The argument then focuses on the most frequently recurring manifestation of Coupland's spiritual sensibility in his use of epiphany as a structuring motif in a number of the novels including Generation X, Life After God, Girlfriend in a Coma, Miss Wyoming (2000) and Eleanor Rigby. These visionary encounters are related to concepts of apocalypse. The final section examines the theological and cultural implications of Coupland's representation of ‘end time’ narratives.
This book is a full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century's most innovative and influential novelists. It explores the prolific first decade-and-a-half of his career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century—amidst the absurd contradictions of instantaneous global communication and acute poverty—Coupland's novels, short stories, essays, and visual art have intervened in specifically contemporary debates regarding authenticity, artifice, and art. This book explores Coupland's response, in ground-breaking novels such as Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, to some of the most pressing issues of our times.