This book is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Douglas Coupland's engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space and religion. This chapter locates Coupland's writing—both his novels and non-fiction—alongside parallel examples of music, film, television and cultural debate of the period. It prioritizes his emergence in the 1990s in relation to the wider X generation phenomenon but also considers issues of reception and thematic and formal development. In most instances, the books have been grouped chronologically, although Life After God and Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) are discussed together primarily on the basis of a shared theme.

Questions surrounding the instant of death form the basis of this chapter which offers a reassessment of two influential readings of Heart of Darkness, those of Miller and Brooks. These readings are linked by a common recognition of the significance of death with regards to meaning, specifically, the death of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. The discussion approaches this case with reference to Heidegger's notion of Dasein as Being towards death and his formulation of death as the ‘possibility of impossibility’ both of which appear in Being and Time. It then critiques Miller and Brooks's readings in relation to Derrida's Aporias which examines the possibility of the experience that is denoted by the phrase ‘my death’ and which poses a radical challenge to Heidegger's notion of death.

Arden of Faversham is a seductive play with which to begin to trace the relationship between images of the household and domestic dramas, and is a strikingly material play in the sense that it insists upon the significance of its locations, pointedly naming places and linguistically producing spaces on the stage. The place in which events occur generates, shapes, affects or complicates action. The detail of place in the play is uniformly precise. The image plays upon the audience's sense of the relationship between what they see on stage and the private life of the characters that they must imagine, and maps this distance between public action and private intimacy onto the seen and unseen spaces of the household. The two most carefully localised episodes in the play are the scenes in Franklin's London house and the murder itself. The house in Arden of Faversham is a space that is ‘governed’ in the physical sense rather than the patriarchal one.

This chapter explores the evolving representation of religious belief in Coupland's work via three connected areas of discussion. The first section locates his fiction in the wider context of the apparent ‘sacred turn’ in contemporary culture. The argument then focuses on the most frequently recurring manifestation of Coupland's spiritual sensibility in his use of epiphany as a structuring motif in a number of the novels including Generation X, Life After God, Girlfriend in a Coma, Miss Wyoming (2000) and Eleanor Rigby. These visionary encounters are related to concepts of apocalypse. The final section examines the theological and cultural implications of Coupland's representation of ‘end time’ narratives.

This chapter draws on Genette's narrative theory in order to locate Marlow in the dual position of narrator and character through close readings of ‘Youth’ and Heart of Darkness, investigating the idea that Conrad's narratives are structured around the transmission of story, and questioning the possibility of sustaining the distinction between that which is transmitted and the means of transmission. With this established, it reads Marlow's role as a narrator in the oral tradition alongside Benjamin's ‘The Storyteller’ in order to introduce a connection between narrative authority and death. The chapter concludes with a reading of ‘Youth’ in which the narrative frame becomes central to a reading of Marlow's ‘central’ story.

This chapter explores Coupland's ambiguous representation of consumption with particular reference to his evolving, and idiosyncratic, fascination with rubbish; waste is a vital and ethically complex category in his fictional aesthetic. Indeed, the novelist's work resonates with the founding concept of Don DeLillo's Underworld (1998), that ‘waste is the secret history, the underhistory’ of civilization. It focuses on Coupland's interpretation of the practices and unconscious habits of mind that surround contemporary commercial activity. The first section focuses on Coupland's evocation of consumer culture. The second and third sections explore the afterlife of objects.

Perhaps the overriding meanings of ‘household’ in A Yorkshire Tragedy are family and lineage, and it offers a complex examination of the intergenerational pull of the ‘house’ as contained by the family seat. It is in the context not only of his role as head of his nuclear family but also as representative of his ancestral heritage that the husband's actions are judged, resulting in a play whose temporal perspective is as wide as that of A Woman Killed With Kindness. A Yorkshire Tragedy treats the familiar domestic themes of the pain of familial rupture and the relationship between household and community, but it does so in a very different theatrical form. The opening scene, in which the servants discuss their London wares, has a familiar social particularity to it, but the rest of the play is totally dissimilar in tone: the physical articulation of rooms and spaces and specifically localised areas of the house are pared down to one significant example. Images that connect earth to heaven, soiling money to ethereal purity, set the play firmly within the morality tradition.