BOOKS : FICTION : Gnomes in nerdsville

MICROSERFS by Douglas Coupland, Flamingo pounds 9.99

EARLY in this book, you learn that the carpeting in the corridors of the Microsoft corporation, where this slim story begins, is "oyster- gray-with-plum highlights". This is the kind of detail - thoroughly researched, reaching for sociological significance, ever so slightly pedantic - on which Coupland has built his career. His short stories and novels see America, and by inference the rest of the rich world, as little more than the sum of its consumer preferences. The persuasiveness of his shopping- list sentences has enabled the careful, Canadian Coupland to appear both as critic and as champion of modern materialism, so doubling his chances of appearing in magazines and on television.

For the first 40 pages here he more than justifies his guru status. His object of study is the Seattle software giant, and, within it, a shared houseful of computer programmers. By conventional definition, they are boring - they wear the same Gap clothes, discuss the Seventies television programmes they grew up with, and, above all, work the same endless hours on a corporate campus of "landscape trees ... seemingly clicked into place with a mouse".

But Coupland's way with details makes them come alive. One microserf called Bug blocks his windows at home with silver paper to keep out sunlight; another, Michael, locks himself in his office after his work is criticised and survives on cheese slices pushed under his door by colleagues. Barely any plot emerges from their seven-day cycle of keyboard tapping and freeway driving: just the slow, tentative moves of the narrator, Daniel, towards another programmer called Karla.

Instead, Coupland works up a definition of the computer nerd as contemporary archetype every bit as perceptive and droll as Peter York's Sloane Ranger. Too busy working to develop social skills or interests, they are like selfish, hyperactive children, hiding inside computer games, blowing big salaries on "last month's blender drink sensation", and sulking when they don't get what they want. Standing over them are the domineering father figures of Microsoft and its boss Bill Gates ("B-B-Bill!"), bribing them with free ice creams and bullying them towards impossible deadlines.

This could almost be a Marxist critique of late capitalism: limitless material choice made meaningless by the quantity of work needed to qualify for it (the microserfs live like poor students despite their stock options). But does it make a novel? This question grows more insistent as the pages roll by. Coupland tries to resolve it by making Michael leave Microsoft to set up his own software company in Silicon Valley, but the action is oddly bloodless. There is no scenery. Coupland's eggheaded characters talk rather than act. For a time, their thoughts on the electronic age, corporate architecture, Gap and anything else that flashes across their over-stimulated minds are diverting - the author knows every cultural micro-debate, mainly because he started many of them. But these e-mail- length reflections are too random and brief to suggest much, other than a narcissism on the part of the author which assumes the reader is fascinated by the cultural minutiae of half a dozen middle-class American lives.

By now you want a story, not cultural studies, but character development is represented by the microserfs sounding increasingly like their computers: "I thought I was a read-only file," says Karla on falling for Daniel. And what plot there is comes as sentimental as an episode of the Brady Bunch. There are sudden illnesses and recoveries, climactic words tapped out feebly on a keyboard, and an optimism quite at odds with the more convincing melancholia of the opening section. Microserfs is more computer game than novel: fun at the start, but more routine the longer you play.