Product Description

From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs,comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves.

Waking up in an L.A. hospital, John Johnson is amazed that it was the flu and not an overdose of five different drugs mixed with cognac that nearly killed him. As a producer of high-adrenaline action flicks, he's led a decadent and dangerous life, purchasing his way through every conceivable variant of sex. But each variation seems to take him one notch away from a capacity for love, and while movie-making was once a way for him to create worlds of sensation, it now bores him. After his near-death experience, John decides to walk away from his life.

Susan Colgate is an unbankable former tv star and child beauty pageant contender. Forced to marry a heavy metal singer in need of a Green Card after her parents squander her sitcom earnings, she becomes the alpha road rat. But when the band's popularity dwindles, the marriage dissolves. Flying back to Los Angeles in Economy, Susan's plane crashes   and only she survives. As she walks away from the disaster virtually unscathed, Susan, too, decides to disappear.

John and Susan are two souls searching for love across the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed landscape of LA, and are driven, almost fatefully, toward each other. Hilarious, fast-paced and ultimately heart-wrenching, Miss Wyoming is about people who, after throwing off their self-made identities, begin the fearful search for a love that exposes all vulnerabilities.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #652249 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-09
• Released on: 2001-01-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com
The eponymous heroine of Miss Wyoming is one Susan Colgate, a teen beauty queen and low-rent soap actress. Dragooned into show business by her demonically pushy, hillbilly mother, Susan has hit rock bottom by the time Douglas Coupland's seventh book begins. But when she finds herself the sole survivor of an airplane crash, this "low-grade onboard celebrity" takes the opportunity to start all over again:

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

From Publishers Weekly
Since Generation X, Coupland has been read more for his trend-setting insights than his novelistic dexterity. In his sixth novel, however, he loses even that edge by jumping on the already tired beauty-pageant-bashing bandwagon. Susan Colgate's mother, Marilyn, is a viciously competitive stage mom who micromanages Susan into teen stardom as Miss Wyoming. But Susan revolts against maternal pressure by dramatically refusing the Miss USA Teen crown, and independently makes her way to Hollywood, where she enjoys her 15 minutes of fame on an '80s sitcom, Meet the Blooms. Her career sliding downhill after that, she goes to New York for an audition; on the way back to L.A., the plane crashes. Thrown clear of the wreckage, Susan survives unscathed, but she allows the world to think that she is dead. Later, she claims she had amnesia, but in reality, she shacked up with a former beauty pageant judge and had a baby. Now 28, Susan has kept the child secret, but her mother eventually intuits its existence. Susan feels she is washed up at 28, until she meets John Johnson, once a powerful hit-making Hollywood producer, who gave away all his possessions and literally walked away from Hollywood, living like a tramp for six months. Now John is baby-stepping back into the real world, supported by his business partner, Ivan. Meeting Susan, he recognizes her as the face he saw in a fever hallucination just before his walkabout. But on the eve of their second date, Susan disappears, so he, another Colgate fan and the fan's unbelievably smart girlfriend search for Susan and her secret child. Coupland's writing is frustratingly uneven, sometimes deftly jokey, other times hopelessly muddled ("her body was mechanically deboned with relief") and his characters, for all their spiritual crises, are about as introspective as cell phones. The plot twists satisfyingly in several places, but in general, Coupland should leave the star-crossed celeb genre to Judith Krantz. 60,000 first printing; 8-city author tour. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Anyone who has read or even heard about Coupland's novels (Generation X, Girlfriend in a Coma) knows that they are firmly entrenched in late 20th-century Americana, paying close attention to the popular culture and how it shapes the people immersed in it. His latest begins with a happy ending: having disowned their respective celebrity careers, fallen starlet Susan Colgate and burnt-out movie producer John Johnson meet at a restaurant and make a love match. Then Coupland rewinds to see how the pair got to that point, detailing Susan's life as a reluctant teen beauty queen and John's reckless, hedonistic lifestyle while steering his characters through a morass of 1990s signposts: near-death experiences, child kidnapping, Internet rumor mongering, and dead celebrity shrines. It would be easy to take pot shots at these people on the fringe, but Coupland portrays them sympathetically, and the chaotic tale is told pretty simply (if not chronologically). A little edge or satire might have made it more interesting, but this is lightweight fun that will find some receptive readers. For larger collections.AMarc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

And Miss Wyoming is...
Would you be seriously interesting in knowing who Miss Wyoming is? No.
So why read this book?

Douglas Coupland's worst book! Do not judge him by this book!
Whatever Miss Wyoming is--a publishing-quota filler, a bout of writer's block, evidence of exhaustion (the man is prolific)--the writing is not representative of the writer.
Why's it stink? Well, mostly because it's just lazy, and ill-conceived. Coupland spends these 311 pages taking aim at the easiest target, Hollywood phonies, filling Miss Wyoming with insufferably obnoxious characters and their tirades of referential dialogue. Normally in his books, this character/type is the exception, a trivial anomaly who's mostly there to mock. Here, though, they're the rule, and there's not one tolerable character because of it. Even the two "heroes" are tossed off, lame approximations of outsider underdogs. The writing is weak too, bereft of Coupland's usual incisive wit and shrewd perception, instead given to sassiness and stupid similes. The book at times even verges on self-parody (Chapter Four), where the prose is so stereotypically rote it could have been spat out from a machine, or a beginning college creative writer.
Anyway, Douglas Coupland is a great author. Almost all of his other work is gold-plated gold. This is his dud. All authors have them; so be it. Read literally any other of his works.

Totally Trashy!
If you are addicted to reading the tabloids then you'll love this book. If you're looking for depth, and intellectual stimulation stay away!