The eponymous heroine of Miss Wyoming is one Susan Colgate, a teen beauty queen and low-rent soap actress. Dragooned into show business by her demonically pushy, hillbilly mother, Susan has hit rock bottom by the time Douglas Coupland's seventh book begins. But when she finds herself the sole survivor of an airplane crash, this "low-grade onboard celebrity" takes the opportunity to start all over again: She felt like a ghost. She tried to find her bodily remains there in the wreckage and was unable to do so.... Then she was lost in a crowd of local onlookers and trucks, parping sirens and ambulances. She picked her way out of the melee and found a newly paved suburban road that she followed away from the wreck into the folds of a housing development. She had survived, and now she needed sanctuary and silence. She's not, of course, the only Hollywood burnout who'd like to vanish into thin air. Her opposite number, a producer of big-budget, no-brainer action flicks named John Johnson, stages a similar disappearing act. After a near-death experience, in the course of which he is treated to a vision of Susan's face, he roams the western badlands. And even after his return to L.A., Johnson is determined to unravel the mystery of this woman's fate.

Throughout, Coupland displays his usual gift for capturing the absurdities of modern existence. The distinctive minutiae of our age--junk mail and fast food, sitcoms and Singapore slings, and the "shop fronts bigger and brighter and more powerful than they needed to be"--come to vivid, funny life in this author's hands. And while Susan and John occupy center stage, Coupland is just as generous with his peripheral characters. A scriptwriter and his supernaturally intelligent girlfriend, a recluse who spends his evening generating Internet rumours--all manage to be blessed and cursed, numbed by their pointless existences but full of humanity when put to the test. Picture Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut collaborating on a Tinseltown version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and you come halfway to grasping Coupland's brand of thoughtful, supremely funny storytelling. --Matthew Baylis

From Publishers Weekly
Since Generation X, Coupland has been read more for his trend-setting insights than his novelistic dexterity. In his sixth novel, however, he loses even that edge by jumping on the already tired beauty-pageant-bashing bandwagon. Susan Colgate's mother, Marilyn, is a viciously competitive stage mom who micromanages Susan into teen stardom as Miss Wyoming. But Susan revolts against maternal pressure by dramatically refusing the Miss USA Teen crown, and independently makes her way to Hollywood, where she enjoys her 15 minutes of fame on an '80s sitcom, Meet the Blooms. Her career sliding downhill after that, she goes to New York for an audition; on the way back to L.A., the plane crashes. Thrown clear of the wreckage, Susan survives unscathed, but she allows the world to think that she is dead. Later, she claims she had amnesia, but in reality, she shacked up with a former beauty pageant judge and had a baby. Now 28, Susan has kept the child secret, but her mother eventually intuits its existence. Susan feels she is washed up at 28, until she meets John Johnson, once a powerful hit-making Hollywood producer, who gave away all his possessions and literally walked away from Hollywood, living like a tramp for six months. Now John is baby-stepping back into the real world, supported by his business partner, Ivan. Meeting Susan, he recognizes her as the face he saw in a fever hallucination just before his walkabout. But on the eve of their second date, Susan disappears, so he, another Colgate fan and the fan's unbelievably smart girlfriend search for Susan and her secret child. Coupland's writing is frustratingly uneven, sometimes deftly jokey, other times hopelessly muddled ("her body was mechanically deboned with relief") and his characters, for all their spiritual crises, are about as introspective as cell phones. The plot twists satisfyingly in several places, but in general, Coupland should leave the star-crossed celeb genre to Judith Krantz. 60,000 first printing; 8-city author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Anyone who has read or even heard about Coupland's novels (Generation X, Girlfriend in a Coma) knows that they are firmly entrenched in late 20th-century Americana, paying close attention to the popular culture and how it shapes the people immersed in it. His latest begins with a happy ending: having disowned their respective celebrity careers, fallen starlet Susan Colgate and burnt-out movie producer John Johnson meet at a restaurant and make a love match. Then Coupland rewinds to see how the pair got to that point, detailing Susan's life as a reluctant teen beauty queen and John's reckless, hedonistic lifestyle while steering his characters through a morass of 1990s signposts: near-death experiences, child kidnapping, Internet rumor mongering, and dead celebrity shrines. It would be easy to take pot shots at these people on the fringe, but Coupland portrays them sympathetically, and the chaotic tale is told pretty simply (if not chronologically). A little edge or satire might have made it more interesting, but this is lightweight fun that will find some receptive readers. For larger collections.AMarc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Tom Shone
If Kerouac had been a couch potato, this is the kind of book he might have written.

From AudioFile
Much like the Hollywood culture Coupland writes about, this latest work features leaps, flashbacks and complicated dance steps. This novel, which follows the bumpy lives of Susan and John, two movie-industry refugees, is the perfect material for the narration team of Sharon Williams and Aaron Fryc. The readers capture the lonesome, sarcastic and hopeful tones of their respective characters, deftly trading off as Susan and John trace the story of their relationship. Williams and Fryc take an intricately woven plot and give it life with their performances. Characters have distinct personalities, and Coupland's story is delivered with style and humor, while the theme of love remains intact. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews
Couplands fifth novel modishly matures the generation he christened (Generation X, 1991) via a lonely pair of thirtyish Hollywood burnouts in search of meaning. Devotees will recognize the characteristic blend of hip cultural references, ambient low-grade humor, and an unravishing love tale involving dead-enders living in hope of hope. The romance is a fragmented affair that resolves itself in this concluding, nullifying phrase: Whatever came to them next would mercifully erase the creatures theyd already become as they crawled along the plastic radiant way. What leads up to that F. Scott Fitzgerald envoi is the story of John Johnson, a maker of mega-selling trash flicks for teens, who falls ill, has a vision, and leaves Hollywood behind for the joys of dumpster diving in the Southwest; and Susan Colgate, a veteran of kiddie beauty pageants whose generous half-hour of sitcom fame has ended, and whose airliner takes a nosedive into a field in the Midwest, leaving her miraculously unharmed. The two meet in a restaurant, take a walk down Sunset in the afternoon, and are mutually enchanted. Despite their efforts to meet again, flashbacks, flashforwards, and sitcom misfortunes intervene. Susies mom Marilyn, broke, deprived of an airline settlement, and abandoned by her resentful daughter, kidnaps Susies infant Eugenea child conceived and born during her anonymous lost year immediately after the plane crashand John, with the help of young lovers Ryan and Vanessa, begins his search for Susie. They all end up in Wyoming, mother and daughter reconciled, mother and infant reunited, and Susie and John heading out for the plastic radiant way. Couplands frenetic, free-associative sensibility is no match for frenetic, free-associative Hollywood; he tells us nothing about our movie capital we havent heard before. (First printing of 60,000; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
Praise for Douglas Coupland

Girlfriend in a Coma

"To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole. . . . Girlfriend approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut."        
-- The Washington Post

Polaroids from the Dead

"What is admirable . . . is that [Coupland] has chosen not to repeat the formula of his earlier commercial success. . . . He bravely commits himself to material that is rich and deeply felt."-- The New York Times

Microserfs

"The novel's real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that spin the '70s, '80s, and '90s . . . and Coupland uses them with relish." - Entertainment Weekly

Life After God

"A revelation . . . suffused with a mystery and regret unique in his work."--Will Blythe, Esquire

"Coupland has at his disposal a dazzling array of tools with which to shape the emotions of his readers: the whimsy of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, the irony of a young Kurt Vonnegut, the poignancy of early John Irving." -- John Tierney, Bookpage

Shampoo Planet

"Having called Coupland's first book a Catcher in the Rye for our time, I repeat myself.  Nobody has a better finger on the pulse of the  twenty-something generation."        -- Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan

Generation X

"A groundbreaking novel."  -- Los Angeles Times

Book Description
She is a former child beauty pageant contender. He is a hard-living movie producer. She walks away from a plane crash without so much as a scratch. He comes away from a near-death experience with a unique, vivid plan.

She, refusing to spend one more day peddling herself for cheesy TV sitcom parts, disappears. He turns his back on a hedonistic life making blockbuster action flicks with names like Mega Force. Shedding their self-made identities, each sets out on an uncharted course across the Gap-clogged, strip-mall landscape of Los Angeles, searching for the one thing, love, that neither has ever really known, but that they now think they just might, actually, desperately want. How could they not find each other?

Download Description
From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, a smart, funny, fast-paced mystery with a heartfelt American romance at its core. Susan is a former child-beauty-pageant contender. John is a hard-living movie producer. She walks away from a plane crash without so much as a scratch. He comes away from a near-death experience with a unique, vivid plan. Susan refuses to spend one more day peddling herself for cheesy TV sitcom parts and takes advantage of a very weird situation to disappear. John turns his back on a hedonistic life making blockbuster action flicks. Shedding their self-made identities, each sets out on an uncharted course across the Gap-clogged, strip-mall landscape of California, searching for the thing -- Love -- that neither has ever really known, but that they now think they just might, actually, desperately want. Assisting Susan and John are a blackmailing pageant mom, a pair of suburban eggheads, a rust-belt refugee, and a salad bar of other twentieth-century Americans who all share the dream of one day taking center stage. In Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland has combined the literary and the popular in a sparkling and witty caper that quietly resonates into the eternal.

From the Publisher
"I happen to be an extravagant admirer of Douglas Coupland who I think is one of the freshest, most exciting voices in the novel...He has a wonderful talent and his new book makes me think of a wonderful comparison with Nathaniel West." -- Tom Wolfe

Douglas Coupland on Miss Wyoming:

Q: Why the title, Miss Wyoming?
A: The main character's mother is a driven stage mother who moves the family to Cheyenne, Wyoming so that her daughter, Susan, has less competition in representing an entire state in national competitions. (Note: Wyoming's population is 435,000.)

Q: What was the start of Miss Wyoming?
A: Oddly, it was last summer's 4-day marriage of 1980's TV soap queen Catherine Oxenberg to film producer Robert Evans. When I read about it my brain turned inside out like a T-shirt. I thought to myself, God, here you have these two Hollywood types who've been around the block collectively maybe ten dozen times, yet they still found something in each other (albeit for only four days) that made the other feel ...clean. Miss Wyoming isn't a roman à clef, but reading about that marriage was certainly the seed crystal.

Q:What's the story about?
A: It starts out with these two characters, John and Susan, who meet and really click with each other like crazy. Susan's 27, an ex-pageant queen, a faded child TV star in an empty marriage to a rock star. John's a decadent action movie producer. And then Susan goes and disappears. Where to? The book becomes a mystery. Where did she go? Why did she go? The book also becomes an examination of how these two people reached such extreme and bizarre life situations. It examines why the two end up being somehow fated for each other.

Q:Your character, John Johnson seems to be a familiar Hollywood type ...thirty-seven ...seedy.
A: Yes and no. I think we're all a bit seedy in the end. But in Hollywood any proclivity toward seediness is certainly indulged as long as you're profitable.

Q: The two characters seem pretty desperate to reinvent themselves. It seems to be what binds them together. Is this an accurate assessment?
A: Very much so. They both have the sensation that many people get, that this is as far as they're ever going to go, that the remainder of their lives has been mapped out for them and they can't, won't stand for it. Like that Talking Heads song "This is not my beautiful wife. This is not my beautiful house. My God, what have I done?"

Q:The pageant world is portrayed in part of the book. It's pretty big, right? What led you to use this as a backdrop in Miss Wyoming?
A:Big? It's staggering. It's a huge sub-industry -- a vast style tribe -- women who try and wear gowns to ten different events a month. It's that whole JonBenet Ramsey culture. I found out about it by accident. A friend of mine is a seamstress and I saw a corner of this magazine peeking out from under a stack of others. I went to reach for it and she lunged at me, but I got it in time. It's called Pageantry and it's like a September Vogue-sized quarterly style bible for pageant goers. It turns out my friend is a secret pageant addict! It was slightly shocking to discover, like finding out she had a Vanilla Ice tattoo. There's this tainted allure to the whole pageant scene -- this eerie netherworld between the trailer park, the suburbs, and the Marriott ballroom -- an uncomfortable gap between the body and the way we're taught to idealize it.

Q: You first hit the literary radar with Generation X -- which was published in 1991 -- pre-grunge even. Why does this book still hit home for readers?
A: Because it's a novel, and novels hopefully tap into something eternal, which is what X did, and which is what all my novels do to some level or other.

Q:How do you cope with being attached to a generation that you've long-since outgrown?
A:Outgrown? Not at all. Everybody grows old together. No one escapes.

Q: ...But the "X" label?
A: It's a part of my life. It's my Campbell Soup can. It's no big deal to me.

Q: How is this book different than some of your previous novels?
A: I hope that it shows a few evolutionary jumps in terms of narrative construction and creation of character. But in the end it's a subjective judgment for a reader to make. All my novels have been different from the others. This is the biggest break, yet it's also the most "Mel." After a point you just have to go with it.

Q: You've just left your longtime editor, Judith Regan, yet some say this is your best work yet. What was the sequence of events here?
A: I'm 37, I write for a living -- and for that matter, writing is my "life" -- and I want to get better and deeper at it. To do this I had to make some large changes in the way I do things. Switching editors and houses isn't something done lightly -- ask any writer. But mine and Judith's lives are so extraordinarily different than what they were in 1991 when I began with her -- a change seemed very natural eight years later.

Q: How did your new editor alter your writing process?
A: With a finickiness and intensity I never quite believed existed in the publishing world. Jenny Minton and Pantheon challenged almost every syllable I wrote -- not changed, but challenged. Any changes were left to my discretion, but most of their challenges were smart, and many were met. The learning curve was like an Alp on this one.

Q: How did you start writing?
A: By accident. I was working as a sculptor and began writing about art. It was a cheap and quick way of paying studio bills. And then I realized I got more out of writing than I did sculpture. So at the age of 28 I started everything over from square one -- going from sculpture into fiction. Talk about a career decision calculated to freak out one's family...

Q:You have a degree in Japanese Business Science?
A: I studied sculpture in Sapporo, Japan in the early 1980s and very much wanted to return and work inside the Japanese creative world which was, and remains, I'm convinced, about 20 years ahead of North American media But without a degree and friends within Japanese industry it's, well ...good luck. So I went and got the degree. It's a speed bump in an otherwise all-arts life. A happy speed bump, but a bump regardless. I think everybody should live in Japan at least once.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves.

SYNOPSIS

From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves.

Waking up in an L.A.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Poniewozik - Time

Miss Wyoming is a brilliant American romantic novel.

Mike Snider - USA Today

Miss Wyoming at heart, is a novel about identity. Overall, Coupland's latest is a pagean of his skills that's deserving of a wider audience.

Ellen Kanner - Miami Herald

Though couched as a classic boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl story, Miss Wyoming is really about seeking meaning and identity in a society courting the vacuous. Coupland made this the subtext of his previous novel, Girlfriend in a Coma, but handles it more confidently and playfully here. He lades on the hip cultural references, of course, but beneath the brand names, there's a warning: Generation X is getting older but not necessarily smarter.

AudioFile - AudioFile Review

Much like the Hollywood culture Coupland writes about, this latest work features leaps, flashbacks and complicated dance steps. This novel, which follows the bumpy lives of Susan and John, two movie-industry refugees, is the perfect material for the narration team of Sharon Williams and Aaron Frye. The readers capture the lonesome, sarcastic and hopeful tones of their respective characters, deftly trading off as Susan and John trace the story of their relationship. Williams and Frye take an intricately woven plot and give it life with their performances. Characters have distinct personalities, and Coupland's story is delivered with style and humor, while the theme of love remains intact. L.B.F. ￯﾿ﾽ AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

Read by Sharon Williams, Aaron Frye

Paul Quinn - The Literary Supplement