'You can leave Bill, but Bill never leaves you,' one young Microsoft refugee in Douglas Coupland's microserfs muses on hearing that the chairman has got married on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. It's a believable sentiment, the lingering awe of an impressionable ex-employee towards his first real boss - and when your first boss is Bill Gates, personality cults die hard. Later in the novel, the narrator describes seeing the boyish billionaire's face on video monitors at an electronics trade show: 'and it was so odd, seeing all of these people, looking at Bill's image, not listening to what he was saying but instead trying to figure out what was his ... secret.'

LRB 6 June 1996 | PDF Download