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or a guy who traffics in themes of alienation and spiritual decay, Douglas Coupland is really into baby squirrels. "It's like a cute-fest out in the yard right now," he says. "If you hear the phone fall on the floor, that's me passing out from cuteness. Hang on, I'm going to go feed them. I'm on the cordless."

I'm on the cordless! I think to myself, this is exactly what would happen in one of his books. A conversation with a stranger, a piece of '90s technology, a brief communion with nature. And, somewhere in between, an epiphany about the human condition. The epiphany doesn't occur here, but still. I accuse him of staging this whole scene so I'll put it in the introduction. "You can't stage cute!" he insists.

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Coupland is one of those rare cases where "voice of his generation" doesn't sound like an unearned honorific cooked up by a publicist. Generation X, released in 1991, crystallized an unspoken yet widespread disposition. The economy was shape-shifting toward short-term employment, the planet was showing signs of mortality, and faith was in short supply — Coupland captured the sense of disaffection in a single novel. In doing so, he instantly became a folk hero to college students and entry-level workers in satellite office parks everywhere, myself included. With subsequent books — Shampoo Planet in 1992, Life After God in 1994, Microserfs in 1995 and Girlfriend in a Coma in 1998 — he evolved the definition of Generation X with eerie accuracy.

His new book, The Gum Thief, is his twelfth novel (counting the one published only in Japan). Its protagonist, Roger, is older and more hopeless than the characters that populate his past stories — an aimless, divorced, alcoholic employee at an office-supply superstore, he reads as a cautionary tale. Coupland himself is now forty-five. He still lives in Vancouver, a city he's strongly associated with, and spends his days writing from home. Two years ago, he came out as gay, though he rarely talks about this publicly. He spoke to Hooksexup about not talking about it, his brushes with van-driving pervs and mood stabilizers, and why even he can't escape the fate of the generation that he himself named. — Will Doig

It seems like a lot of the characters in this book are more beaten down than the characters in your other books. Why is that?

[Laughs] I think it's because my eyes are wider these days. I was down at the shopping mall today and realizing how completely invisible I was to people of a certain age. Yet as you get older, more and more people become visible to you, and — I'm forty-five. How old are you?

Twenty-eight.

Oh boy. You have so much to look forward to.

Ha! Not according to your book.

It's just that my eyes have gotten wider, and I can't not see people anymore.

Roger's life seems so bleak. Do you think that's individual to him, because of his drinking and his loneliness, or is that an inevitable part of aging?

I know too many Rogers. As you get older, the number of doors open to you goes down so quickly, whether by inertia or bad decisions or good decisions that went wrong, and you just end up in this Rogery place. There's this thing that happens I think around thirty-eight where people hear the final door slam and then they change — quit their job, move somewhere else, go get their Master's degree, they'll split up and recombine in some unexpected way and — fuck it, I don't know how I'd reinvent myself right now if I had to.

It would be different for you, though, wouldn't it? Because you're famous?

Oh, no one escapes. What I notice now about the people I know is that everyone's parents are starting to go, so there's no buffer generation between you and the grave anymore. And people's knees are going or their back's going, and you wake up one day and you have a pain or a bump or something.

Do you think romantic relationships can stave off loneliness?

I'm sure Oliver Sachs has done studies on this. I think falling in love and being lonely are two completely different roads of the brain. There's probably some lima-bean-shaped, lentil-sized nodule that dictates being in love or not, whereas simply not being lonely is a different part.

Do you feel cynical about love?

I don't think so at all. Actually, what's kind of amazing is that everyone I know who dates now seems to meet over the internet, for better or worse.

I met my boyfriend over the internet.

There you go. Someone explains to you the concept of "finding the one," and then you go online and it turns out there are 3,600,000 "ones."

Why did you wait so long to come out publicly?

I just wanted to stop people thinking that I'm hiding something. I think it's as simple as that. Done. Next!

I think every generation probably thinks sex is completely different for them than it was for the previous generation, but to me, sex today does really seem like a whole new ballgame. Porn, internet dating . . .

I can't imagine what that's like. I don't want to sound like a perv or something, but the number of options and ways to hook up — I remember when I was growing up and I was hitchhiking. I was kind of clueless about things that most people were clued in on back in the '70s. Basically, if you hitchhiked it was like saying, "Ready for a hookup!" I remember once with a few friends, we were going over to Grouse Mountain in this van this guy's driving, and he's like, "Hey guys, what do you think of these pictures here?" It's all this pervy stuff. I'm like, "I think I have to get out of here." Looking back on it now, there's probably so many signals I missed. It was like the golden age of innocence.

So you would never go on an internet date?

Well, never say never. I think it's different for me, because I put my picture on there and the game's over.

Because you think it's just for younger people?

No, no, it's just because I'm, like, in the public realm. No, the age thing doesn't matter. It's different for guys.

Is it hard to date when everybody knows who you are?

[Laughs] To date? I don't know. I don't date, so I don't know.

How come you don't date?

I'm in a relationship, thank you. And I've been asked not to discuss it. Sometimes I ask people in my life whether or not I can talk about things, and some say yes and this one's a no, so I can't talk about it. Both my parents are fine. My parents are like, "Talk about us all you want!"

When you wrote Life After God in the mid-'90s, it was before this whole Christian fundamentalist movement really got going in the U.S. Do you think that book is negated by the rise of that religious movement?

I was writing about the numinous sense of the holy, not any sort of doctrinaire way of looking at religion. I'm not orthodox in any way, and it's kind of strange for me when you get into American politics. I'm amazed at how interwoven church and state have become.

You often get called a futurist. It's like a way of calling someone a soothsayer without sounding crazy. How do you feel about that label?

Oh, I don't mind it. It's better than being called retrograde. Or a presentist. My parents, they're in this neighborhood that really hasn't changed — not even a new deck — for, God, forty years now. It's strange growing old when nothing around you is growing old. I think growing old in Europe must be a very different thing. Or even Boston. Everything around you is old.

Yeah, Vancouver isn't like that at all.

There's nothing old here, and if there is, we just burn it down and build something new.

Do you ever get accused of being a misanthrope?

"Accused" is a pretty strong word. I know I've said this before, but I think human beings are just one molecule more on the side of good than evil. It's so close. I mean, there's a millionth of a fraction of a decimal of a molecule that's a little bit better, I think.

It seems like right now there are so many books out about happiness. Everybody wants to learn about happiness, and presumably learn why they aren't. Do you think this whole pursuit is fruitless, or is happiness a good thing to study?

In the '70s and early '80s, when the whole New Age thing was going on, what made it so strange was that everyone was being so woooooo! about it. Now, it's almost as if everyone's being almost military about it — like, what experiments do we have on light intake to maximize happiness? How much vitamin D do I have to take? What's my optimal energy curve? Everyone's being wildly practical about it, which is unprecedented I think. Way beyond just vitamins and Wellbutrin and stuff. I think it only gets scary when it starts to turn into industrial efficiency, like people wanting to be happier so they can be more productive.

I remember the character in Life After God, he stops taking his pills because he felt they were flattening him out.

He was just taking the wrong pills, that's all. I had this one experience, it was so strange and awful and kind of spooked me for a long time. I had this real bad patch in '80-something, and back then there weren't so many of these things around, and I think it was Effexor, I took it and I wanted to kill myself. [Ed. note: Effexor was invented in 1993, so it must have been something else.] I felt like a bad article in Newsweek. But this was like, now I know what Kurt Cobain was feeling. It's a very unmistakable impulse that fortunately got washed away a lot when that was the first and last one I took. Learning the truth about certain kinds of impulses like that, I have more empathy with people.

So much of your work has dealt with the idea of human extinction, which seems to suddenly be a trendy topic as well. There was Children of Men, and there's that new book out called The World Without Us —

I read that. It's great.

Why do you think we're suddenly fascinated by our own absence?

This goes right back to high school. I used to be on the science track, and I know from studying calculus that you're always looking for the "absolute end." So, will human beings be around in a million years? No. A half-million? No. 150,000? Maybe. It's a numbers game. We just don't know when. But I think that we're also seeing a lot of end-game scenarios being painted out for us, like the polar ice caps melting. And I think Google Earth might have catalyzed something similar to when the Apollo missions took pictures of Earth from outer space, when there had never been a sense of the planet being the planet.

Do you think this is all psychically wearing on us as a society?

On the Doug Apocalytometer scale of one to ten, I think we're not that high up. But it is in the background.

Okay. Well, thanks. You were really patient with me. I appreciate it.

No, it's a pleasure. So what's the site?

It's just hooksexup.com. I can't remember what we have up today. Oh, you know what? I wrote an essay yesterday if you want to read it. Listen to how presumptuous I'm being.

[Accessing the site] A picture of Brad Pitt here . . .

Oh, God. We're an intelligent site, I swear.

It says, "Did you have that Maggie Gyllenhaal dream again?" There's a lot of columns here. Hang on. Which one's yours?

I wrote one about wine bars.

Wine bars exist?

Yeah. Well, in New York they do. I wrote about how I don't like wine bars and how I feel about it in dating situations, but —

Here we are . . . "The drink that tanked your date . . . "

Wow. See, okay, this is a stupid thing. Okay, I'm gonna go.

Just kidding. I wish all my interviews were this fun.

 n°

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