Paperbacks

 

From Independent on Sunday (September 7, 1997)

by Jenny Turner

Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland, Flamingo pounds 8.99.

"This book," says Coupland, "explores the world that existed in the early 1990s, back when the decade was young and had yet to locate its own texture." Sixties survivors mixing withgrunge kids at the California Grateful Dead concerts, 1991: Ossi Berliners in 1994, " a headless bear of jealousy that slouches through the Brandenburg Gate, not knowing what it wants, only that it wants more". Born in 1961 - and hence rather old now toidentify with his original Generation X youth thang - Coupland appears, throughout these intermingled essays and short factions, to be maturing well. There's a particularly fine, Benjamin-like meditation on the LA suburb of Brentwood, desirable once forits very anonymity, famous now and for ever as the empty, "de-narratised" neighbourhood in which Nicole and OJ Simpson made their marital home.