You can read the sixty stories in Douglas Coupland’s Binge one at a time, or you can wolf them down by the dozen. Each is four or five pages long. Like pills, they deliver quick hits: some will make you feel euphoric, while others will calm you and help you concentrate. The first-person narrators brood on a variety of topics: cystic fibrosis, autism, rare blood types, a penchant for nudism, others’ sexual habits, morbid disgust about animal parts converted into food, addiction, and the occasional murder. This is Coupland’s first new work of fiction in almost a decade, and what a sardonic takedown of contemporary consumerism it is.
Many of these stories start like therapy sessions —“My name is Rumwoman and I’m an alcoholic”— before they launch into tales of contemporary woe. A few end with marriage or redemption. Most of them, however, are concerned with people who have “lost the ability to know themselves.” Characters huff solvents, hire hit men, or...
Allan Hepburn is the James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University.
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