If you write to earn a living, you tend to journalism. There•you, don't have to expose yourself or your inner preoccupations, just bravely take on the soul grinding task of organizing and writing up the details of other peoples' lives and misadventures. Your reward is bread on the table. Or you can write what you hope will be enjoyed by a publisher, which some great force compels you to compose. It is ultimately measured as entertainment or diversion - literature. The reward here is usually less nourishing. Either way the documentary tradition is now deeply ingrained in the Canadian psyche; so much so that improvisational liberties can be taken. Vancouver's new literary star, Douglas Coupland, eschews any personal signature. He hides behind the first person narrator, but knows we know his own biography fits the character. No changing the licence plates to American ones on his movie-set streets this time. The book is almost a travelogue of the B.C: Lower Mainland. And there's no doubting his honesty, no way to ignore the moral challenge in "letting it all hang out." "Generation X-ray" is more like it. Coupland's latest, Life After God (Distican $20) is an assemblage of eight stories, all told in the same narrative voice. The title piece is a masterful short story, sweetly melancholy, yet powerful enough to leave long burning afterimages: "As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the colour of Earth as seen from outer space ... pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses - all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed and we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing - bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands like astronauts..." This is the Omni magazine generation. But demons bother the Voice, existential demons. A decade and a half after the pool parties, he admits he and his pals are having a tough time settling down. These guys may have been given too much whole grain and orange juice as kids. When they worry, boy, do they worry! "I think there was a tradeoff somewhere along the line, I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love, instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss ot God." Smart remark: The answer, I think, is yes. Out of the mouths of babes ... heh? 0-671-874330

--By Tom Shandel [BCBW 1994]