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Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland
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Miss Wyoming (2000)

by Douglas Coupland

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1,628134,072 (3.38)16
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A thoroughly enjoyable and deeply satisfying novel, peopled with believably damaged characters and interesting reflections on the nature of celebrity. ( )
  AJBraithwaite | Aug 7, 2012 |
When Coupland is good, he's very good, producing stunners like Microserfs and Generation X. When he's bad, we get wooden novels like Miss Wyoming. MW starts with promise--its characters are D-list celebs who are, like most of Coupland's protagonists, in search of meaning in a culture that encourages disposable beauty and consumerism. But instead of pursuing the promise of plot, Coup gives us pop-culture trivia and factoids ad nauseum. None of these are enough to create either plot or personality. There are slivers of brightness--a scene where Susan, the main character, squats in a suburban house is one--but they're few and far in between. ( )
  PhoebeReading | Nov 24, 2010 |
Rather earnest and preachy, although the Hollywood mogul who tries to give it all up made me laugh. ( )
  phoebesmum | Mar 13, 2010 |
Susan Colgate is a child brought up in the pageant culture. Her mother is a white-trash stage mother. Susan eventually trades the pageant circuit for the Hollywood circuit. The experiences she has in both venues are interesting, funny, and bizarre. This was a very good book with quirky but likeable characters with the theme of cheating death and new beginnings a constant throughout the book. I particulary liked how the story dealt with humans recreating themselves over and over again in their lives and the effect that has on them and the people around them. Very enjoyable read. ( )
  CatieN | Oct 4, 2009 |
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Susan Colgate sat with her agent, Adam Norwitz, on the rocky outdoor patio of the Ivy restaurant at the edge of Beverly Hills.
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California.
Phoenix risen from ashes
reinvents itself.
(SomeGuyinVirginia)

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0375707239, Paperback)

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

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 04 Jan 2013 11:14:34 -0500)

(see all 6 descriptions)

On surviving a plane crash, a beauty queen disappears to live a meaningful life and meets a film producer with similar goals. But their romance is threatened by her mother, who wants her back in the limelight. A satire on celebrity status by the author of Generation X.… (more)

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