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Loading... Miss Wyomingby Douglas Coupland
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 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 |  moonsoar | Jun 13, 2009 | Quirky and entertaining—but too random and shallow to support its attempt at a greater theme. (  ) wktarin | Sep 26, 2008 | Miss Wyoming is as delightful as it is frightening. Frightening in the sense that, yes, this is the human condition. It skips about in time, narrating both the history and current affairs of a former teen pageant queen and a washed up movie star. Susan Colgate has survived a plane crash followed by a year-long disappearance; John Johnson has survived a drug overdose followed by months of self-prescribed homelessness. Both characters grew up amid some extremely odd family dynamics. As the story switches perspectives and carves out each surprise, you find yourself putting faith in the aforementioned human condition, and the odd little mission that this pair ultimately have set out to achieve. (  ) pinkymccoversong | Jun 22, 2008 | Not bad, but not up to his best work. But then, I read it in a hotel room, in an airport, and on an overnight plane flight so you may get more out of it than I did. (  )1  TomSlee | Apr 26, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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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 Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:12:04 -0500)
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