Miss Wyoming [Paperback]

Douglas Coupland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375707239
• ISBN-13: 978-0375707230
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #568,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Comedy of Manners For Generation X, July 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Miss Wyoming: A Novel (Hardcover)

Douglas Coupland is the writer whose book, Generation X, was so smart, hip and slightly disillusioned that it coined a phrase to describe a generation of smart, hip and slightly disillusioned Americans.

This book, Miss Wyoming, follows the parallel stories of Susan Colgate and John Lodge Johnson and encompasses everything from the American beauty pageant culture to near death experiences.

Susan Colgate is a former pageant "work horse" and low-budget television star. Typical of pageant hopefuls and television aspirants, she embodies a surgically-enhanced, plastic kind of unnaturally-endowed beauty and, as would be expected, her life unfolds much like a trite and manipulative soap storyline. One racing toward a definitely unhappy end.

Susan, however, is a survivor. She has survived a manipulative and grasping stage mother, a plane crash in which she was the only survivor, and a year in which she "went along" with the story of her own apparent death.

John's life hasn't been a whole lot better. The son of a downwardly-mobile and rapidly-fading socialite and her constantly-disappearing husband, John endured a childhood filled with endless illness and depression only to come into his own as a successful maker of films.

Success for John, though, is narrowly defined and means the constant ricochet from one stimulus-induced high to another. For John, the bigger the high, the more thrilling the thrill, and no amount of money is too much to spend.

His "thrilling" lifestyle, however, comes to an abrupt crash landing when he falls prey to a particularly virulent virus and experiences an astral projection, the likes of which he has previously only dreamed.

It is when Susan and John meet that Miss Wyoming really takes off.

Coupland is one of those rare authors whose subject matter suits his writing style perfectly. Yes, much of it is "mind candy" but it is mind candy written with such an infectious joyousness that it is difficult for even the most jaded reader to resist its allure. His characters are victims of the too-much-too-often, freeze-dried, quick-fix excess, yet they are never trite and never fail to amuse.

The plot ricochets from one event to another, much like the characters, and they do their best to struggle and survive and even, at times, connect.

Miss Wyoming is definitely satire and it is modern satire of the highest order. Surprisingly so. The patron saint of satire, Oscar Wilde, defined the genre as being not only witty, succinct and accurate, but also imbued with a love of humanity and all its quirks. Coupland's writing shows this same generosity and love of his fellow man and it is this quality, more than any other, that pulls Miss Wyoming far above other novels in the genre.

What could be more ripe for criticism than the youth-and-beauty-worshiping, celebrity-obsessed, consumerist culture of America today? Yet, Coupland embraces this culture with a sweetness that brings his flawed and failing but always-hanging-in-there characters to life.

Our priorities, says Coupland, are genuinely laughable, but we can and sometimes do, transcend them. While lampooning the excesses of America today, Coupland still manages to cherish his fellow man, quirks and all. It is this very innocence and love that, in the end, make Miss Wyoming a very hip, very smart and very compassionate book to read.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Typical Coupland... Great!, January 25, 2000

By 

Andrew Harbick (Harrisonburg, VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Miss Wyoming: A Novel (Hardcover)

Though not my favorite Coupland (Life After God), I enjoyed Miss Wyoming every bit as much as I've enjoyed all of his other works. If you get nothing else out of his works, you get rich characters and an almost philosophical look at meaning in life. In addition, Miss Wyoming is a great love story. As you read it, you sympathize with the characters to the point that you feel anxiety and love as if you were them. You understand John Johnson's lovesickness and why he can't sleep or eat. You crave resolution. You want John to be able to express everything he feels for Susan. You want the happy ending. You desire the only thing that seems to bring a sense of meaning to the lives on the characters in the book. Miss Wyoming is a gripping book that is hard to put down and at the same time it is a cerebral book that asks the tough questions about life. Thoroughly enjoyable.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A real treat., December 31, 1999

By 

Stephen Douglas Page (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Miss Wyoming: A Novel (Hardcover)

Get this book, and put it in the hands of people who have never read Coupland's work.

I think Coupland has found a great balance between character and plot in this novel. The characters in this book are interesting, engaging, and feel realistic. The dramatic tension from the different story threads moving back and forth in time worked well, I couldn't wait to get back to each thread.

In some of Coupland's earlier books I liked the style and fresh point of view more than the story. In Miss Wyoming the style serves to propel the story, the story stands on its own. Read it.