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In the first Souvenir of Canada book, Coupland provides an amusing spotters’ guide to locating the hidden Canadians among the populace of their neighbors to the south (i.e. the U.S.): they will occasionally let slip with metric measurements, and, if hit by a car, they will apologize to the driver. As self-effacing as he may mean it to be, there feels to me a kernel of truth in that evaluation that ties directly back into the ingenuousness of Degrassi Junior High: What would translate into overheated soap opera WB melodrama on our airwaves remained remarkably well-modulated, even polite, on theirs.

Degrassi Junior High never worried about being cool, or stuffing its casts with teen models, singers hyphenate actors, or soundtrack album tie-ins. And yet for all its grittiness, I don’t think I would say it subscribed to realism entirely. In trying to put it into words, I would have to say it created a genre of idealized realism, where issues were dealt with in a serious manner and matters were not routinely wrapped up in a neat bow at the half hour, but a constant flow of integrity permeated everything such that you couldn’t help but believe that eventually everything would be okay, even if parental deaths, abusive boyfriends, junior high pregnancies, and molesting teachers seemed to lurk around every corner. I almost feel the pull of nostalgia at work as I am typing this, but for what precisely, I am not sure.

My relationship with novelist Coupland (who turns 50 tomorrow) is a lot more complicated, complex and aggravating than that with Degrassi (which I say even as I fall further and further behind in my well-meant goal to catch up with the latest series iteration - Degrassi: The Next Generation - which has now reached its 11th season, the prior 10 of which sit unwatched, filling up major real estate on my DVD towers). If you know only one thing about Coupland, it is probably that he wrote a novel in 1991 entitled Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that is more or less responsible for popularizing that categorization, one so stigmatic and tenaciously sticky it has ensured a perpetual well of jokes among comedians, critical studies among cultural anthropologists, and a deep pool of loathing among those who fall in among its chronological boundaries.

The first work of his I read was actually his second novel Shampoo Planet, which I happened to encounter in a small bookstore in Sisters just days after reading a particularly eviscerating capsule review in the state newspaper. It took me many, many false starts and stops to be able to finish, an act that has been repeated several times over the last 20 years, involving at least one out of every two of his books. I go through a recurring phase where I suffer a strange kind of cultural amnesia in regards to Coupland, wiping the thought of him and his works like a spot off my brain. Then like clockwork, I think to myself, “ I wonder what’s up with Douglas Coupland” and more often than not, he has just come out with something new.

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