Jenny Turner

Douglas Coupland has a special relationship with furniture. A page in the March 2000 issue of Wallpaper magazine puffs his own designs for a target-shaped occasional table, a Damien Hirst-spotted desk and the ‘DNA Band’ standing light. A Sunday-supplement profile-writer caught him bulk-buying ceramic vases which he intends to ‘repurpose’ at a later date; when at home in Vancouver, we learn from the same article, he ‘rearranges his furniture weekly’. In his new novel, a big-shot Hollywood film producer explains how he goes about recruiting young assistants. ‘What I normally do is put ads in the paper advertising Eames furniture at ridiculously low prices … Anybody who answers that ad really quickly is de facto smart, alert, greedy and hip.’ ‘I turned into furniture,’ is what the characters in his first book, Generation X, say when they are intoxicated or exhausted and on the point of crashing out.‘

‘Can this beautiful young model be thinking?’ Tim Parks asks at one point in this book. ‘One hopes not,’ the argument continues, as Parks’s narrator looks through an airline magazine, ‘You do not think, I thought, seeing pictures of people pleasure-making on the beach, perhaps in an advertisement for rum or Martini … that for all the beauty of their surroundings and indeed themselves these fortunate people are nevertheless obliged to think, obliged to be conscious.’ Once said, it’s so obvious, isn’t it: people like to look at pictures of models because they imagine the models’ heads to be empty, which allows them to empty their own heads as they gaze. Some go for pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow. Some prefer that ad on the television with all the joyously bounding dogs.‘

The other day, I went to Water-stone’s in the Charing Cross Road to buy a copy of The Rules, the notoriously neo-conservative American dating manual which was a huge hit when it was first published in 1995. My excuse was that ‘The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing’, the title story in Melissa Bank’s short-story collection, has a Rules epigraph, and contains several Rules discussions, and is to some extent a Rules critique. On my way, I noticed that self-help books are kept next to philosophy, and when you see them close together, you notice how very much they are about the same great themes: death (Coping with Bereavement by Hamish McIlwraith), angst (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers), the limits of reason (Edward de Bono, The Five-Day Course in Thinking). The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do drive in Western culture is indeed ancient, and has surprisingly widespread roots.‘

‘Snow-balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware’ – that’s what it says right now in the window of my local bookshop. It’s been painted on the glass by hand. It’s from the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.’

Morvern Callar has lived for the whole of her 21 years so far in the Port, a depressed tourist trap somewhere on the west coast of Scotland, where the mountains meet the sea. She left school early, at the age of 15, to take up a job on the fruit-and-vegetable counter of the local superstore. A year later she met her boyfriend, 13 years her senior, the wealthy son of a nearby hotel-keeper, recently come home after years of travelling ‘in countries’. So Morvern moved out of her fosterdad’s flat in the Complex, losing the friendship of her old gang as she did so. These days, she sometimes goes out with Lanna from the bakery counter while her boyfriend stays at home, busy on his computer, working on the model-railway version of his birthplace he keeps hidden in the loft.