Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
This book is lauded as the zeitgeist manifesto of Generation X, and to some extent, that’s true. It takes place in the mid-nineties, in Redmond, WA and Silicon Valley, and if you lived through that time (and especially if you were in your early twenties in that time) Microserfs will hit your nostalgia button.
Dan Underwood is a microserf, that is, he’s a tester/coder at Microsoft, where employees are expected to work 12, 24, or 36 hour shifts coding and subsist entirely on processed foods bought in bulk from Price-Costco, as it used to be called. And he does, along with his friends/housemates, but somewhere along the way they start to worry that they don’t have lives. So they move to Silicon Valley, to work for a new startup called Oop!
The work is what defines them (they don’t like to date or interact with anyone who isn’t a techie) but even more than the work itself, they’re defined by the group cohesion that the work fosters. At its core, this book is really about the interrelationships of the group of people who become friends while working on the same project at Microsoft, and maintain that friendship even through a move across the country, financial hardships, unfortunate bouts with communism, and health issues.
As with many novels, Microserfs’ strength is also its weakness. I refer to the constant philosophizing. All of the characters have rich interior lives, and they banter back and forth about philosophical questions, nuances of character, and what it means to be living in the nineties. Reading this, I felt like I was a member of a really tight knit group of smart friends who shared an inordinate number of inside jokes. I really liked the characters, and almost regretted not being a microserf myself when I had the chance, until I remember what long hours, no sunlight and a diet of entirely processed food does to your body. (That and I learned human languages in college instead of computer ones.)
Sometimes these observations were interesting, and occasionally even amusing or profound. For example, when a character thanks the other for the fax he sent, and remarks, “Faxes are like email from 1987.” Other times, the observations were the kind that make a lot of sense and seem great until you wake up/sober up/come down off your high. Ie. “Abe is against the lack of gun-ho-ishness in pure research. He says Interval is an intellectual Watership Down.” Um, how is a theoretical research firm like a novel about rabbits? I get the writing desk/raven riddle, but that one left me stumped.
The other aspect of this novel that I disliked were the pages with random, stream-of-consciousness type text in a plethora of fonts interspaced throughout the novel. I’d be reading along and there’d be this page with text that made about as much sense as those poetry fridge magnets. There’d be random thoughts interspaced with product names, all in varying large bold fonts. Other times, there’d be one or two pages with a single word, like “money” typed across both pages. Maybe Coupland was trying to make some profound statement about non-linear thought, but they came across to me like he was trying too hard. I detest pretention, especially when people confuse incomprehensiblity with profundity. At best, I found these pages a waste of ink and paper.
I did like the characters, and while it dragged out very slow in the last third of the novel, it had a plot that ended satisfactorily. I recommend this novel for Gen X ers, and people who want to understand them.
