Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland was originally published in 1999. My hardcover copy has 311 pages. Although this was entertaining, it was not my favorite Coupland. There were some good descriptions, nice parallel storylines, and some interesting characters, but it just fell a little flat for me. This could be due to reading All Families are Psychotic right before it, but, all in all, it will never be one of my favorite Coupland novels. Rating: 3.9
Synopsis from cover:
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.
Quotes:
"Susan Colgate sat with her agent, Adam Norwitz, on the rocky outdoor patio of the Ivy restaurant at the edge of Beverly Hills." first sentence
"Commercials are weird. You can go be in a reasonably successful TV weekly series for years and nobody mentions it to you, but appear at three A.M. in some god-awful sauce plug and people phone to wake you up and scream, 'I just saw you on TV!' " pg. 7
"The producer's Prince Charles spaniel had the runs, which had the hotel management badgering him with phone calls and door knocks while Susan was bravely making the most of stale coffee-tea-or-me jokes written by USC grads weaned on a lifetime of Charles in Charge, plus four years of Gauloises and Fellini ephemera." pg. 14
"A brief survey of her body showed she was unscratched, yet it appeared to her that all the other passengers were crushed and broiled and broken along a debris path that stretched half a mile across the sorghum field hemmed with tract housing." pg. 16-17
"Eugene went through life like a Great Dane or a speeding ambulance, exacting the unfettered awe of whomever he passed." pg. 86
"[S]he looked at high school as a numbing, slow-motion prison to be endured only because her depressingly perky and unimaginative parents refused to make an effort to either enroll her in gifted-student programs or permit her to skip grades, which they worried, ironically, might cripple her socially. Her parents viewed high school as a place of fun and sparkling vigor, where Snapple was drunk by popular crack-free children who deeply loved and supported the Coolidge Gators football team." pg. 244
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