Whereas you'd normally cheer for the underdog in a comic novel, in Douglas Coupland's new novel you're hoping he will be run over by a garbage truck.

Douglas Coupland has kept his finger on the prostate of pop culture ever since his 1991 debut, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, inspired critics to dub him "spokesman"; for a generation that spent the social revolution of the Sixties in diapers and came of age to the polarized sound-tracks of disco and punk rock.

Coupland's subsequent literary output has been a predictably post-modern mixed bag, from the introspection of Waiting for God, a collection of John Cheever-ish tales of spiritual yearning in the desert of materialist suburbia, to novels like Microserfs, set among computer coders-the invisible Morlocks who slave in the digital mines to enable and maintain the electronic world most of us now interact with more frequently than the "real"; one.

The oddly titled Worst. Person. Ever. (pronounced with teenage neo-Valley Girl emphasis on each word) may not make it into the canon of early 21st century English Lit, but it's a whooping, high-speed joyride through the post-millennial Blandscape. The main characters are British because-as anyone who ever watched BBC comedy series on public television knows-their absurd sensitivity to outdated social class distinctions and obsolete imperialist cultural arrogance makes Brits more fun to take the piss out of than any other people on the planet.

Coupland's literary models for Worst. Person. Ever. are modern British humorists, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, J.P. Donleavy and the under-rated Leslie Thomas; writers who made irony an occasion for laughter instead of classical tears. He pays lip service to the central convention of the British comic novel-the well-meaning innocent who suffers a picaresque series of misadventures at the hands of sinister representatives of the status quo-but gives it a typically post-modern twist.
Our hero, Raymond Gunt believes himself to be "a reasonable enough citizen. You know; live life in moderation, enjoy the occasional YouTube clip of frolicking otters and kittens, perhaps over tip a waitress who makes the effort to tart herself up a bit, or maybe just make the effort to try to be nice to the poor...";, yet with every sentence of his tale of woe, Raymond reveals himself to be the kind of chap some of his fellow Londoners would describe with a multi-expletive phrase ending in a word that rhymes with his last name.

An underemployed film and TV cameraman, Raymond is reduced to begging work from his estranged wife, Fiona, who launched her wildly successful casting agency at his suggestion and lives to pack salt into his gaping psychic wounds. Having to be grateful for the latest bone she tosses him, an assignment to be on the camera crew of an episode of the unkillable TV series Survivor, being shot on an infinitesimal speck in the Pacific Ocean whose name is almost longer than its shoreline (The Republic of Kiribati), puts him in such a funk that he snottily baits a homeless man who accosts him after the conjugal interview. Raymond is promptly beaten down and forced to lick the filthy sidewalk. When he has to hire a personal assistant and realizes he has no friends, he seeks out the homeless philosopher Neal, who owes much to Nick Nolte's role as the brilliant, irreverent vagrant-by-choice in the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

Accidentally seated next to an enormously obese man on the first leg of his flight into his personal heart of darkness, Raymond's sly, sneaky nastiness eventually results in the man's death on the plane. On landing, he discovers the man was the producer of the show on which he is to work. This pretty much sets the tone for everything that follows. The difference is that when you'd normally cheer for the underdog in a comic novel, in Worst. Person. Ever. you're hoping the underdog will be run over by a Garbage Truck. Very. Soon.

Having created a character who is a self-centered, supercilious arse-boil, Coupland sets out to save him and his equally odious other half, Fiona, who has hidden the fact that Raymond fathered two beautiful children, raised in the electronically innocent isolation of the Outer Hebrides. As successive catastrophes overwhelm the Survivor Kiribati set and crew, Raymond and Fiona are transformed into an unlikely Adam and Eve; flawed parents united by their determination to raise children better than themselves.

In its way, Worst. Person. Ever. is a perverse paean to the "family values"; so cynically referenced by current political demagogues. It is a kind of fable, a post-modern parable which suffers from all the outrageous gaps of logic and continuity such tales are heir to, yet touches on a fundamental human truth.

Coupland's alter-ego, the visual artist, is the eminence gris that links his sometimes superficially disparate literary works. No writer since Oscar Wilde has so clearly understood that it is the visible surfaces of things that reveal the truth, not some academic safari into presumed intellectual depths.

It's no accident that Raymond and Fiona are both agents of the industry that manufactures the pixel-deep images that have become the archetypes of our virtual culture, or that they become involved with the television series Survivor, in which contestants attempt to "outwit, outplay and outlast"; each other in primitive environments for monetary and celebrity rewards. After more than a decade, the blatantly contrived faux-reality program is still produced in the U.S. and clones are made under franchise in more than fifty countries world wide.

Pull out your ear-buds and listen. That sound you hear is the ghosts of Darwin and Wilde, laughing their asses off.

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The first major survey exhibition of Douglas Coupland's work as prolific designer and visual artist, everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything, will be presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery from May 31-September 1, 2014.

Fiction columnist John Moore writes better than nearly everyone else from Garibaldi Highlands.