The author of Generation X on his short-lived career as a restaurant reviewer, his strangest ever meal and why he loves the writing on TripAdvisor
Brasserie Max at the Covent Garden Hotel gives out onto bustling Monmouth Street and when I arrive early for a Saturday lunch with Douglas Coupland he is already there at a window table, eyes quick to the shuffle outside, ever alert to the zeitgeist. Coupland is one of the great observers of our jump-cut world; his antennae for new ironies twitch constantly. It’s 20-odd years since he made his name, at 30, with Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the era-nailing novel that seemed to be written entirely in aphorism. Since that defining moment, he has never stopped trying to keep up with that attention-deficit consumer culture he projected, even as it has gone further into digital fast-forward.
Our lunch is a jolly tour of current preoccupations. Before we order Coupland has already navigated between these sentences: “I have not thought of Albania in a year. What are they up to?”, “I’m currently trying to organise an Infinite Jest-athon in Vancouver,” and “You know that men over 35 make their biggest online purchases between 11 and midnight? It’s like: ‘Hey, I’ll buy a boat’”.
He apologises briefly for his appearance – “I was in Berlin for a week then I got here Monday. I am at that two-week mark of living out of a suitcase where everything is a bit shaggy looking”, though in a pale linen jacket and bold shirt he looks the picture of neat – and gives me a précis of the trip so far. He stayed at the Soho House in Berlin, a hotel of “uncanny genius”. “You walk in and they are playing your playlist, then you get into your room and you think this could be my room, and then something dawns on you like: ‘this could be Watership Down, they know too much’”.
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Our lunch is a jolly tour of current preoccupations. Before we order Coupland has already navigated between these sentences: “I have not thought of Albania in a year. What are they up to?”, “I’m currently trying to organise an Infinite Jest-athon in Vancouver,” and “You know that men over 35 make their biggest online purchases between 11 and midnight? It’s like: ‘Hey, I’ll buy a boat’”.
He apologises briefly for his appearance – “I was in Berlin for a week then I got here Monday. I am at that two-week mark of living out of a suitcase where everything is a bit shaggy looking”, though in a pale linen jacket and bold shirt he looks the picture of neat – and gives me a précis of the trip so far. He stayed at the Soho House in Berlin, a hotel of “uncanny genius”. “You walk in and they are playing your playlist, then you get into your room and you think this could be my room, and then something dawns on you like: ‘this could be Watership Down, they know too much’”.
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