I’ve just finished the book so I came back to read what you thought of it — I was worried you loved it and I’d have to justify my disappointment! I agree about the thinness of the characters — I didn’t care about any of them.
It felt like someone writing a Dougland-Coupland-style book. In previous novels the characters often said things that made me think “wow, I didn’t realise anyone else thought that,” somehow picking up on ideas I thought were personal but were actually part of the larger world.
This time the characters say things that are annoying and unbelievable, or that sound like they’re supposed to be clever and original but are nothing new, or that sound like someone desperately wanting to talk like a Douglas Coupland character. (The bit where they decide phrases look thirty four per cent more evil when set in Courier jumped out at me as a trying-too-hard example of the latter.)
It’s not that I hated it — it was a nice enough read — but I was just disappointed. Unlike his other books it doesn’t mean anything to me.
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