SOURCE: “Tales from Slacker Hell,” in Fortune, Vol. 132, No. 6, September 18, 1995, p. 235.

In the following review of Microserfs, Aley evaluates the substance of Coupland's characters and prose style.

Toward the end of Microserfs, Douglas Coupland's latest novel, one of the characters angrily demands to know who on earth ever started the media hype surrounding “slackers,” that allegedly disaffected cohort of people born in the 1960s and the early 1970s.

Who, indeed. Coupland is the author of Generation X, the urtext of slackerhood, and has made a career of plumbing the minds of baby-busters, Xers, or whatever you want to call them. In his latest iteration, the disaffected young people or serfs all work at Microsoft, a place ruled by an amoral force of nature known as “Bill” (as in “Gates”). The serfs speculate on the limits of Bill's seeming omnipotence and ponder the billion-dollar swings in Bill's stock with...