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.


The New York Times Book Review, Tom Shone
If Kerouac had been a couch potato, this is the kind of book he might have written.


From AudioFile
Much like the Hollywood culture Coupland writes about, this latest work features leaps, flashbacks and complicated dance steps. This novel, which follows the bumpy lives of Susan and John, two movie-industry refugees, is the perfect material for the narration team of Sharon Williams and Aaron Frye. The readers capture the lonesome, sarcastic and hopeful tones of their respective characters, deftly trading off as Susan and John trace the story of their relationship. Williams and Frye take an intricately woven plot and give it life with their performances. Characters have distinct personalities, and Coupland's story is delivered with style and humor, while the theme of love remains intact. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
Couplands fifth novel modishly matures the generation he christened (Generation X, 1991) via a lonely pair of thirtyish Hollywood burnouts in search of meaning. Devotees will recognize the characteristic blend of hip cultural references, ambient low-grade humor, and an unravishing love tale involving dead-enders living in hope of hope. The romance is a fragmented affair that resolves itself in this concluding, nullifying phrase: Whatever came to them next would mercifully erase the creatures theyd already become as they crawled along the plastic radiant way. What leads up to that F. Scott Fitzgerald envoi is the story of John Johnson, a maker of mega-selling trash flicks for teens, who falls ill, has a vision, and leaves Hollywood behind for the joys of dumpster diving in the Southwest; and Susan Colgate, a veteran of kiddie beauty pageants whose generous half-hour of sitcom fame has ended, and whose airliner takes a nosedive into a field in the Midwest, leaving her miraculously unharmed. The two meet in a restaurant, take a walk down Sunset in the afternoon, and are mutually enchanted. Despite their efforts to meet again, flashbacks, flashforwards, and sitcom misfortunes intervene. Susies mom Marilyn, broke, deprived of an airline settlement, and abandoned by her resentful daughter, kidnaps Susies infant Eugenea child conceived and born during her anonymous lost year immediately after the plane crashand John, with the help of young lovers Ryan and Vanessa, begins his search for Susie. They all end up in Wyoming, mother and daughter reconciled, mother and infant reunited, and Susie and John heading out for the plastic radiant way. Couplands frenetic, free-associative sensibility is no match for frenetic, free-associative Hollywood; he tells us nothing about our movie capital we havent heard before. (First printing of 60,000; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Praise for Douglas Coupland

Girlfriend in a Coma

"To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole. . . . Girlfriend approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut."        
-- The Washington Post

Polaroids from the Dead

"What is admirable . . . is that [Coupland] has chosen not to repeat the formula of his earlier commercial success. . . . He bravely commits himself to material that is rich and deeply felt."-- The New York Times

Microserfs

"The novel's real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that spin the '70s, '80s, and '90s . . . and Coupland uses them with relish." - Entertainment Weekly

Life After God

"A revelation . . . suffused with a mystery and regret unique in his work."--Will Blythe, Esquire

"Coupland has at his disposal a dazzling array of tools with which to shape the emotions of his readers: the whimsy of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, the irony of a young Kurt Vonnegut, the poignancy of early John Irving." -- John Tierney, Bookpage

Shampoo Planet

"Having called Coupland's first book a Catcher in the Rye for our time, I repeat myself.  Nobody has a better finger on the pulse of the  twenty-something generation."        -- Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan

Generation X

"A groundbreaking novel."  -- Los Angeles Times


Review
Praise for Douglas Coupland

Girlfriend in a Coma

"To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole. . . . Girlfriend approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut."        
-- The Washington Post

Polaroids from the Dead

"What is admirable . . . is that [Coupland] has chosen not to repeat the formula of his earlier commercial success. . . . He bravely commits himself to material that is rich and deeply felt."-- The New York Times

Microserfs

"The novel's real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that spin the '70s, '80s, and '90s . . . and Coupland uses them with relish." - Entertainment Weekly

Life After God

"A revelation . . . suffused with a mystery and regret unique in his work."--Will Blythe, Esquire

"Coupland has at his disposal a dazzling array of tools with which to shape the emotions of his readers: the whimsy of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, the irony of a young Kurt Vonnegut, the poignancy of early John Irving." -- John Tierney, Bookpage

Shampoo Planet

"Having called Coupland's first book a Catcher in the Rye for our time, I repeat myself.  Nobody has a better finger on the pulse of the  twenty-something generation."        -- Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan

Generation X

"A groundbreaking novel."  -- Los Angeles Times


Book Description
From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, a smart, funny, fast-paced mystery with a heartfelt American romance at its core.
Susan is a former child-beauty-pageant contender. John is a hard-living movie producer. She walks away from a plane crash without so much as a scratch. He comes away from a near-death experience with a unique, vivid plan.
Susan refuses to spend one more day peddling herself for cheesy TV sitcom parts and takes advantage of a very weird situation to disappear. John turns his back on a hedonistic life making blockbuster action flicks. Shedding their self-made identities, each sets out on an uncharted course across the Gap-clogged, strip-mall landscape of California, searching for the thing--Love--that neither has ever really known, but that they now think they just might, actually, desperately want.
Assisting Susan and John are a blackmailing pageant mom, a pair of suburban eggheads, a rust-belt refugee, and a salad bar of other twentieth-century Americans who all share the dream of one day taking center stage. In Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland has combined the literary and the popular in a sparkling and witty caper that quietly resonates into the eternal.


Download Description
From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, a smart, funny, fast-paced mystery with a heartfelt American romance at its core. Susan is a former child-beauty-pageant contender. John is a hard-living movie producer. She walks away from a plane crash without so much as a scratch. He comes away from a near-death experience with a unique, vivid plan. Susan refuses to spend one more day peddling herself for cheesy TV sitcom parts and takes advantage of a very weird situation to disappear. John turns his back on a hedonistic life making blockbuster action flicks. Shedding their self-made identities, each sets out on an uncharted course across the Gap-clogged, strip-mall landscape of California, searching for the thing -- Love -- that neither has ever really known, but that they now think they just might, actually, desperately want. Assisting Susan and John are a blackmailing pageant mom, a pair of suburban eggheads, a rust-belt refugee, and a salad bar of other twentieth-century Americans who all share the dream of one day taking center stage. In Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland has combined the literary and the popular in a sparkling and witty caper that quietly resonates into the eternal.


From the Publisher
"I happen to be an extravagant admirer of Douglas Coupland who I think is one of the freshest, most exciting voices in the novel...He has a wonderful talent and his new book makes me think of a wonderful comparison with Nathaniel West." -- Tom Wolfe

Douglas Coupland on Miss Wyoming:

Q: Why the title, Miss Wyoming?
A: The main character's mother is a driven stage mother who moves the family to Cheyenne, Wyoming so that her daughter, Susan, has less competition in representing an entire state in national competitions. (Note: Wyoming's population is 435,000.)

Q: What was the start of Miss Wyoming?
A: Oddly, it was last summer's 4-day marriage of 1980's TV soap queen Catherine Oxenberg to film producer Robert Evans. When I read about it my brain turned inside out like a T-shirt. I thought to myself, God, here you have these two Hollywood types who've been around the block collectively maybe ten dozen times, yet they still found something in each other (albeit for only four days) that made the other feel ...clean. Miss Wyoming isn't a roman à clef, but reading about that marriage was certainly the seed crystal.

Q:What's the story about?
A: It starts out with these two characters, John and Susan, who meet and really click with each other like crazy. Susan's 27, an ex-pageant queen, a faded child TV star in an empty marriage to a rock star. John's a decadent action movie producer. And then Susan goes and disappears. Where to? The book becomes a mystery. Where did she go? Why did she go? The book also becomes an examination of how these two people reached such extreme and bizarre life situations. It examines why the two end up being somehow fated for each other.

Q:Your character, John Johnson seems to be a familiar Hollywood type ...thirty-seven ...seedy.
A: Yes and no. I think we're all a bit seedy in the end. But in Hollywood any proclivity toward seediness is certainly indulged as long as you're profitable.

Q: The two characters seem pretty desperate to reinvent themselves. It seems to be what binds them together. Is this an accurate assessment?
A: Very much so. They both have the sensation that many people get, that this is as far as they're ever going to go, that the remainder of their lives has been mapped out for them and they can't, won't stand for it. Like that Talking Heads song "This is not my beautiful wife. This is not my beautiful house. My God, what have I done?"

Q:The pageant world is portrayed in part of the book. It's pretty big, right? What led you to use this as a backdrop in Miss Wyoming?
A:Big? It's staggering. It's a huge sub-industry -- a vast style tribe -- women who try and wear gowns to ten different events a month. It's that whole JonBenet Ramsey culture. I found out about it by accident. A friend of mine is a seamstress and I saw a corner of this magazine peeking out from under a stack of others. I went to reach for it and she lunged at me, but I got it in time. It's called Pageantry and it's like a September Vogue-sized quarterly style bible for pageant goers. It turns out my friend is a secret pageant addict! It was slightly shocking to discover, like finding out she had a Vanilla Ice tattoo. There's this tainted allure to the whole pageant scene -- this eerie netherworld between the trailer park, the suburbs, and the Marriott ballroom -- an uncomfortable gap between the body and the way we're taught to idealize it.

Q: You first hit the literary radar with Generation X -- which was published in 1991 -- pre-grunge even. Why does this book still hit home for readers?
A: Because it's a novel, and novels hopefully tap into something eternal, which is what X did, and which is what all my novels do to some level or other.

Q:How do you cope with being attached to a generation that you've long-since outgrown?
A:Outgrown? Not at all. Everybody grows old together. No one escapes.

Q: ...But the "X" label?
A: It's a part of my life. It's my Campbell Soup can. It's no big deal to me.

Q: How is this book different than some of your previous novels?
A: I hope that it shows a few evolutionary jumps in terms of narrative construction and creation of character. But in the end it's a subjective judgment for a reader to make. All my novels have been different from the others. This is the biggest break, yet it's also the most "Mel." After a point you just have to go with it.

Q: You've just left your longtime editor, Judith Regan, yet some say this is your best work yet. What was the sequence of events here?
A: I'm 37, I write for a living -- and for that matter, writing is my "life" -- and I want to get better and deeper at it. To do this I had to make some large changes in the way I do things. Switching editors and houses isn't something done lightly -- ask any writer. But mine and Judith's lives are so extraordinarily different than what they were in 1991 when I began with her -- a change seemed very natural eight years later.

Q: How did your new editor alter your writing process?
A: With a finickiness and intensity I never quite believed existed in the publishing world. Jenny Minton and Pantheon challenged almost every syllable I wrote -- not changed, but challenged. Any changes were left to my discretion, but most of their challenges were smart, and many were met. The learning curve was like an Alp on this one.

Q: How did you start writing?
A: By accident. I was working as a sculptor and began writing about art. It was a cheap and quick way of paying studio bills. And then I realized I got more out of writing than I did sculpture. So at the age of 28 I started everything over from square one -- going from sculpture into fiction. Talk about a career decision calculated to freak out one's family...

Q:You have a degree in Japanese Business Science?
A: I studied sculpture in Sapporo, Japan in the early 1980s and very much wanted to return and work inside the Japanese creative world which was, and remains, I'm convinced, about 20 years ahead of North American media But without a degree and friends within Japanese industry it's, well ...good luck. So I went and got the degree. It's a speed bump in an otherwise all-arts life. A happy speed bump, but a bump regardless. I think everybody should live in Japan at least once.


From the Inside Flap
From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, a smart, funny, fast-paced mystery with a heartfelt American romance at its core.


Susan is a former child-beauty-pageant contender. John is a hard-living movie producer. She walks away from a plane crash without so much as a scratch. He comes away from a near-death experience with a unique, vivid plan.


Susan refuses to spend one more day peddling herself for cheesy TV sitcom parts and takes advantage of a very weird situation to disappear. John turns his back on a hedonistic life making blockbuster action flicks. Shedding their self-made identities, each sets out on an uncharted course across the Gap-clogged, strip-mall landscape of California, searching for the thing--Love--that neither has ever really known, but that they now think they just might, actually, desperately want.


Assisting Susan and John are a blackmailing pageant mom, a pair of suburban eggheads, a rust-belt refugee, and a salad bar of other twentieth-century Americans who all share the dream of one day taking center stage. In Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland has combined the literary and the popular in a sparkling and witty caper that quietly resonates into the eternal.


From the Back Cover

Praise for Douglas Coupland

Girlfriend in a Coma

"To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole. . . . Girlfriend approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut."        
-- The Washington Post

Polaroids from the Dead

"What is admirable . . . is that [Coupland] has chosen not to repeat the formula of his earlier commercial success. . . . He bravely commits himself to material that is rich and deeply felt."-- The New York Times

Microserfs

"The novel's real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that spin the '70s, '80s, and '90s . . . and Coupland uses them with relish." - Entertainment Weekly

Life After God

"A revelation . . . suffused with a mystery and regret unique in his work."--Will Blythe, Esquire

"Coupland has at his disposal a dazzling array of tools with which to shape the emotions of his readers: the whimsy of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, the irony of a young Kurt Vonnegut, the poignancy of early John Irving." -- John Tierney, Bookpage

Shampoo Planet

"Having called Coupland's first book a Catcher in the Rye for our time, I repeat myself. Nobody has a better finger on the pulse of the twenty-something generation."        -- Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan

Generation X

"A groundbreaking novel." -- Los Angeles Times


About the Author
Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany, in 1961. His previous books are Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Life After God, Microserfs, Polaroids from the Dead, and Girlfriend in a Coma. He works as a designer and sculptor in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is writing his next novel.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One

Susan Colgate sat with her agent, Adam Norwitz, on the rocky outdoor patio of the Ivy restaurant at the edge of Beverly Hills. Susan was slightly chilly and kept a fawn-colored cashmere sweater wrapped around her shoulders as she snuck bread crumbs to the birds darting about the ground. Her face was flawlessly made up and her hair was cut in the style of the era. She was a woman on a magazine cover, gazing out at the checkout-stand shopper, smiling, but locked in time and space, away from the real world of squalling babies, bank cards and casual shoplifting.

Susan and Adam were looking at two men across the busy restaurant. Adam was saying to Susan, "You see that guy on the left? That's 'Jerr-Bear' Rogers, snack dealer to the stars and the human equivalent of an unflushed toilet."

"Adam!"

"Well, it's true." Adam broke open a focaccia slice. "Oh God, Sooz, they're looking at us."

"Thoughts have wings, Adam."

"Whatever. They're both still staring at us."

A waiter came and filled their water glasses. Adam said, "And that other guy -- John Johnson. Semisleazebag movie producer. He vanished for a while earlier this year. Did you hear about that?"

"It sounds faintly familiar. But I stopped reading the dailies a while ago. You know that, Adam."

"He totally vanished. Turns out he OD'd and had some kind of vision, and then afterward he gave away everything he had -- his house and cars and copyrights and everything else, and turned himself into a bum. Walked across the Southwest eating hamburgers out of McDonald's dumpsters."

"Really?"

"Oh yeah. Hey . . ." Adam lowered his voice and spoke out the side of his mouth. "Oh Lordy, it looks like John Johnson's fixated on you, Sooz, gawping at you like you were Fergie or something. Smile back like a trouper, will you? He may be gaga, but he's still got the power."

"Adam, don't tell me what to do or not to do."

"Oh God. He's standing up. He's coming over here," said Adam. "Lana Turner, be a good girl and tuck in your sweater. Wow. John Johnson. Whatta sleazebag."

Susan turned to Adam. "Don't be such a hypocrite, Adam, like you're so pure yourself? Know what I think? I think there's a touch 'o the 'bag in all of us."

John was by then standing a close but respectful distance from Susan. He looked at her with the unsure smile of a high school junior bracing himself to ask a girl one social notch above him to dance at the prom, his hands behind his back like a penitent child.

"Hello," he said. "I'm John Johnson." He stuck out his right arm too quickly, surprising her, but she took his hand in hers and slid her chair back onto the flagstones so that she could survey him more fully -- a sadly handsome man, dressed in clothes that looked like hand-me-downs: jeans and a frayed blue gingham shirt, shoes a pair of disintegrating desert boots with a different-colored lace on each foot.

"I'm Susan Colgate."

"Hi."

"Hi to you."

"I'm Adam Norwitz." Adam lobbed his hand into the mix. John shook it, but not for a moment did he break his gaze on Susan.

"Yes,"' said John. "Adam Norwitz. I've heard your name before."

Adam blushed at this ambiguous praise. "Congratulations on Mega Force," he said. Owing to John's radical decision of the previous winter, he was not making a single penny from his current blockbuster, Mega Force. In his pocket were ninety $20 bills, and this was all the money he had in the world.

"Thank you," said John.

"Adam told me that you're a sleazebag," said Susan. John, caught completely off guard, laughed. Adam froze in horror, and Susan smiled and said, "Well, you did say it, Adam."

"Susan! How could you -- "

"He's right," said John. "Look at my track record and he'd be bang on. I saw you feeding birds under the table. That's nice."

"You were doing it, too."

"I like birds." John's teeth were big and white, like pearls of baby corn. His eyes were the pale blue color of sun-bleached parking tickets, his skin like brown leather.

"Why?" Susan asked.

"They mind their own business. No bird has never tried to sneak me a screenplay or slagged me behind my back. And they still hang out with you even if your movies tank."

"I certainly know that feeling."

"Susan!" Adam interjected. "Your projects do well."

"My movies are crap, Adam."

Across the terrazzo, Jerr-Bear made the ah-oooo-gah, ah-oooo-gah noise of a drowning submarine in order to attract John's attention, but John and Susan, alone among the annoyed lunchtime crowd, ignored him.

Adam was trying to figure a way out of what he perceived as a dreadful collision of faux pas, mixed signals and badly tossed banana cream pies, and said, "Would you and your, er, colleague, like to join us for lunch, Mr. Johnson?"

John suddenly seemed to realize that he was in public, in a restaurant, surrounded by people bent on eating food and gossiping, and that this was the opposite of the place he wanted to be. He stammered, "I -- "

"Yes?" Susan looked at him kindly.

"I really need to get out of here. You wouldn't want to come with me on a -- I dunno -- a walk, would you?"

Susan stood up, catching Adam's bewildered eyes. "I'll call you later, Adam."

Staff scurried about, and in the space of what seemed like a badly edited film snippet, John and Susan were out on North Robertson Boulevard, amid sleeping Saabs and Audis, in dazzling sunlight that made the insides of their eyeballs bubble as though filled with ginger ale.

"You'd think our family had invented the atom bomb from the way they all lorded about the eastern seaboard. But then they did this really weird thing."

"What was that?" Susan asked.

"We went through our own family tree with a chain saw. Ruthless, totally ruthless. Anybody who was found to be socially lacking was erased. It was like they'd never even lived. I have dozens of great-uncles and aunts and cousins who I've never met, and their only crime was to have had humble lives. One great-uncle was a prison warden. Gone. Another married a woman who pronounced 'theater' thee-ay-ter. Gone. And heaven help anybody who slighted another family member. People weren't challenged or punished in our family. They were merely erased."

They were quiet. They'd walked maybe a mile by now. John felt as close to Susan as paint is to a wall. John said, "Tell me something else, Susan. Anything. I like your voice."

"My voice? Anybody can hear my voice almost any time of day anywhere on earth. All you need is a dish that picks up signals from satellite stations that play nonstop cheesy early eighties TV shows." They were outside a record store. Two mohawked punk fossils from 1977 walked past them.

John looked at her and said, "Susan, have you ever seen a face, say -- in a magazine or on TV -- and obsessed on it, and maybe secretly hoped every day, at least once, that you'd run into the person behind the face?"

Susan laughed.

"I take it that's a yes?"

"How come you're asking?"

John told Susan about a vision he'd had at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center the year before that led him to make a drastic life decision. He told Susan that it was her face and voice that had come to him during his vision. "But what happened was that months later, after I'd gone and completely chucked out all of my old life, I realized I didn't have this great big mystical Dolby THX vision. I realized that there'd merely been some old episode of that TV show you used to star in playing on the hospital's TV set beside my bed. And it must have melted into my dream life."

It made a form of sense to Susan that this man with sad, pale eyes like snowy TV sets should have seen her as a refuge and then found her. Years before she'd stopped believing in fate. Fate was corny. Yet with John that long-lost tingle of destiny was once again with her.

A leaf blower cut the moment in two, and just as John was about to raise his voice, Cedars-Sinai came into view far in the distance, between a colonnade of cypress trees and a billboard advertising gay ocean-liner cruises. John's shirt was now soaked through with sweat, so they stopped at a convenience store and bought an XXL I-LOVE-LA white cotton shirt and two bottles of water. He changed out in the parking lot to the amused ogling of teenage boys who yelled out, "Boy supermodel steals the catwalk!"

John said, "Fuck 'em," and they crossed Sunset. It was getting to be late in the afternoon, and the traffic was crabby and sclerotic. They entered a residential neighborhood. Susan was feeling dizzy and sleepy and said, "I need to sit down," so they did, on the curb before a Wedgwood-blue French country-style house under the suspicious gaze of an Asian woman on the second floor.

"It's the sun," said Susan. "It's not like it used to be. Or, I can't take as much as I used to." She lay back on the Bermuda grass.

Suddenly worried he'd been the only one spilling the beans, John said, "Tell me about the crash. The Seneca crash. I'll bet you never talk about it, do you?"

"Not the full story, no."

"So tell me." Susan sat up and John put his arm around her. Staring at the pavement, like Prince William behind his mother's coffin, she told the story. And she might have talked to him all night, but two things happened: the lawn sprinklers spritzed into frantic life, and a Beverly Hills police patrol car soundlessly materialized. Two grim-faced officers got out, hands on weapons on hips. Soaked, Susan started to stand up, but her tired knees buckled. John helped pull her up, saying, "Jesus, we try and take a quick rest and in comes the SWAT team. Who pays your salaries, you goons? I pay your salaries. . . ."

"There's no SWAT team, Mr. Johnson. Stay calm," said one of the officers. "Ma'am" -- he looked more closely at her -- "Mrs. Thraice? Can we help you? Give you a lift? You were great in Dynamite Bay." Dynamite Bay was a low-budget action picture now in wide video release and not doing too badly. Adam had been proclaiming it as the revival of Susan's acting career.

She took a professional tone. "Hello, boys. Yes, I'd love a ride." She turned toward John and smiled regretfully. "I'm great for long walks but otherwise I'm not really Outward Bound material. Another day, another pilgrimage." She entered the rear passenger seat, and the officer shut the door. She rolled down the window. "To Beechwood Canyon, boys." She looked out at John. "You know -- I don't even know my own phone number. Call Adam Norwitz." Just as the cruiser pulled away, she rolled up a silk scarf, wet from the sprinkler, and handed it to John. "What actually happened after the crash is a much better story. I should have told you that instead. Phone me." And then she was gone and John stood, clutching the silk to his heart while the sprinkler drenched his feet, as though they were seeds.


"Are you okay for walking in those shoes?" John asked.

"These? I could climb Alps in these puppies." She smiled. "No man's ever asked me that before."

"They look Italian."

"I bought them in Rome in 1988, and they've never let me down once."

"Rome, huh? What was going on in Rome?"

"I was doing a set of TV commercials for bottled spaghetti sauce. Maybe you saw them. They were on the air for years. They spent a fortune getting everybody over there and then they shot it inside a studio anyway, and then they propped it with cheesy Italian stuff, so it looked like it was filmed in New Jersey."

"Welcome to film economics."

"That wasn't my first lesson, but it was one of the strangest. You never did commercials, did you?"

"I went right into film."

"Commercials are weird. You can go be in a reasonably successful TV weekly series for years and nobody mentions it to you, but appear at three A.M. in some god-awful sauce plug, and people phone to wake you up and scream, 'I just saw you on TV!' "

A mailman walked by, and once he'd passed John and Susan, in cahoots they copied his exaggerated stride, then made devilish faces at each other.

"You gotta hand it to him," Susan said about the mailman, now out of earshot, "for a guy his age, he sure works it."

"How old do you think I am?" asked John.

Susan appraised him. "I'll guess forty. Why do you ask?"

"I look forty?"

"But that's good. If you're not forty, then it means you've accrued wisdom beyond your, say, thirty-five years. It looks good on a man."

"I'm thirty-seven."

"You still haven't told me why you asked."

"Because I think about how old I am," John replied, "and I wonder, Hey, John Johnson, you've pretty much felt all the emotions you're ever likely to feel, and from here on it's reruns. And that totally scares me. Do you ever think that?"

"Well, John, life's thrown me a curveball or two, so I don't worry about the rerun factor quite so much. But yeah, I do think about it. Every day, really." She looked over at him. "For what it's worth, today is my twenty-eighth birthday."

John beamed. "Happy birthday, Susan!" He then shook her hand in a parody of heartiness, but secretly savored how cool her palms were, like a salve on a burn he didn't even know he had.

The novelty of strolling in their city rather than barreling through it inside air-conditioned metal nodules added an unearthly sensation to their steps. They heard the changing gears of cars headed toward the Beverly Center. They listened to birdcalls and rustling branches. John felt young, like he was back in grade school.

"You know what this feels like -- our leaving the restaurant like that?" Susan asked.

"What?" John replied.

"Like we're running away from home together."

They walked across a sunbaked intersection where a Hispanic boy with a gold incisor was selling maps to the stars' homes. John asked Susan, "You ever been on one of those things?"

"A star map? Once, for about two years. I was deleted in a reprinted version. Cars would drive past my place and then slow down to almost a stop and then speed up again -- every day and every night. It was the creepiest thing ever. The house had good security, but even then, a few times I was spooked so badly I went and stayed at a friend's place. You?"

"I'm not a star." Just then the Oscar Mayer wiener truck drove by and cars all around them honked as if it were a wedding cortège. Screwing up his courage, John asked, "Susan -- Sue -- speaking of curveballs, here's one for you. A simple question: do you think you've ever met me before?"

Susan looked thoughtful, as though ready to spell out her reply in a spelling bee. "I've read about you in magazines. And I saw a bit of stuff about you on TV. I'm sorry things didn't work out for you -- when you took off and tried to change yourself or whatever it was you were trying to do. I really am." The wiener hubbub had died down, and Susan stepped in front of John to survey him. His eyes looked like those of somebody who's lost big and is ready to leave the casino. "I mean, I've been pretty tired of being 'me' as well. I sympathize."

John moved as if to kiss her, but two cars behind them squealed their tires in a pulse of road rage. They turned around and the walk resumed.

"You were a beauty queen, weren't you?" John asked. "Miss Wyoming."

"Oh Lord, yeah. I was on the beauty circuit since about the age of JonBenet-and-a-half, which is, like, four. I've also been a child TV star, a has-been, a rock-and-roll bride, an air crash survivor and public enigma."

"You like having been so many different things?"

Susan took a second to answer. "I never thought of it that way. Yes. No. You mean there's some other way to live?"

"I don't know," said John.

They crossed San Vicente Boulevard, passing buildings and roads that once held stories for each of them, but which now seemed transient and disconnected from their lives, like window displays. Each recalled a bad meeting here, a check cashed there, a meal. . . .

John asked, "Where are you from?"

"My family? We're hillbillies. Literally. From the mountains of Oregon. We're nothing. If my mother hadn't escaped, I'd probably be pregnant with my brother's seventh brat by now -- and somebody in the family'd probably steal the kid and trade it for a stack of unscratched lottery cards. You?"

In a deep, TV-announcer voice he declared, "The Lodge Family of Delaware. 'The Pesticide Lodges.' " His voice returned to normal. "My maternal great-grandfather discovered a chemical to interrupt the breeding cycle of mites that infect corn crops."

A light turned green and the boulevard was shot with traffic and the pair walked on. Susan was wrapped in a pale light fabric, cool and comfortable, like a pageant winner's sash. John was sweating like a lemonade pitcher, his jeans, gingham shirt and black hair soaking up heat like desert stones. But instead of seeking both air-conditioning and a mirror, John merely untucked his shirt and kept pace with Susan.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

SYNOPSIS

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Poniewozik - Time

Miss Wyoming is a brilliant American romantic novel.

Mike Snider - USA Today

Miss Wyoming at heart, is a novel about identity. Overall, Coupland's latest is a pagean of his skills that's deserving of a wider audience.

Ellen Kanner - Miami Herald

Though couched as a classic boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl story, Miss Wyoming is really about seeking meaning and identity in a society courting the vacuous. Coupland made this the subtext of his previous novel, Girlfriend in a Coma, but handles it more confidently and playfully here. He lades on the hip cultural references, of course, but beneath the brand names, there's a warning: Generation X is getting older but not necessarily smarter.

AudioFile - AudioFile Review

Much like the Hollywood culture Coupland writes about, this latest work features leaps, flashbacks and complicated dance steps. This novel, which follows the bumpy lives of Susan and John, two movie-industry refugees, is the perfect material for the narration team of Sharon Williams and Aaron Frye. The readers capture the lonesome, sarcastic and hopeful tones of their respective characters, deftly trading off as Susan and John trace the story of their relationship. Williams and Frye take an intricately woven plot and give it life with their performances. Characters have distinct personalities, and Coupland's story is delivered with style and humor, while the theme of love remains intact. L.B.F. ￯﾿ﾽ AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

Read by Sharon Williams, Aaron Frye

Paul Quinn - The Literary Supplement