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The title comes from Coupland's feeling that, as he read over his pieces that would become this book, he was rifling through a kitchen drawer of photographs and postcards. To accentuate this sense, the book features 42 black-and-white photos. Coupland begins with a series of short fiction pieces, all set at a Grateful Dead show in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum in 1991. He creates keen character studies such as Diana, a hippie turned real-estate developer in Hawaii and Stacy, a college freshman thrilled to be, as she says, "like one of those sixties photographs."
In the second section, entitled "Portraits of People and Places," Coupland travels widely, sharing his appreciation for Lion's Gate Bridge in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia and his unexpected hurt at Kurt Cobain's suicide. In what is by far the most touching piece in the book, Coupland takes under his wing a young German reporter, who reminds him of himself when he was 24, and reflects upon life and death and love and happiness.
Ending in Brentwood, California, a place that Coupland says "has never thought of itself as even existing," points to the predominant sense of rootlessness-of both place and time-that binds together the various pieces in Polaroids from the Dead. As Coupland writes in the introduction, the rapid acceleration of life in the '90s has meant that "even a place in time as recent as last week can now feel like it happened a decade ago." While not an entirely different sentiment from the one found in his earlier works, Coupland reaches a greater maturity and sophistication in Polaroids from the Dead. His trademark style-ironic and coolly detached-certainly is present, but it is tempered by a thoughtfulness that makes his new work most appealing.
Lisa Magnino is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.