This is Coupland's sixth novel, and his first written entirely in third person.  In hindsight, I think the third person narrative is a big factor in why I enjoyed it more than some of his earlier novels.  Coupland's voice can sometimes push towards "too precious" territory, but the third person gives us distance from that.  By separating the reader from the character, it gives us some breathing room, and some perspective to see the characters as they are. I sometimes feel that I'm being smothered by the quirkiness of Coupland's characters.  It's good to get some distance.

According to Wikipedia, this is also the first book Coupland wrote without relying on notes.  Previously he carried a little notepad with him wherever he went, and used those notes extensively when creating his books.  But Miss Wyoming was written off the top of his head, as it were, and it does feel a lot less artificial than his earlier books.

The basic plot of Miss Wyoming is a bog simple "boy meets girl."  In this case the girl is Susan Colgate, who was first a child pageant queen, then a washed up 80s child star, and later entered into a green card marriage with a closeted rock star.  The boy is John Johnson, a former Hollywood bigwig who nearly died of the flu (exacerbated by his fame-driven excesses of drugs, drink, women, and so forth).

Both Susan and John are recently returning to "the real world" after taking a year off from life.  John gave away everything he had and went wandering the desert as a transient.  Susan was the only survivor of a plane crash, and snuck away to start a new life before the authorities arrived on the scene.  

The story is told almost entirely in flashback, various levels of time travel back into the pasts of Susan and John (mostly Susan), and occasionally Susan's mother.  This constant flashbacking eventually started to grate on my nerves.  Coupland does an adequate job of anchoring the reader at the beginning of the flashback, but it's still a little tiresome after a while.  

There's a reason the flashback is usually only employed with a light touch.  Reading a book composed entirely of flashbacks is kind of like eating a cake composed entirely of icing.  Burp.  Eventually you start to lose touch with what's real, what's happening "now," and it un-moors the reader from the story entirely.  Which I'm sure was kind of the point, aesthetically speaking, but it makes it difficult to relate to the text as a while.

In reading Miss Wyoming, I was reminded most of Chuck Palahniuk's writing, but without the gore and lurid extremes.  It has the same kind of feel, in a way I can't quite explain.  Maybe it's just because the structure and some of the themes of Miss Wyoming are oddly similar to that of Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters.

All that being said, on the individual scene level Miss Wyoming is one of Coupland's best books.  And definitely recommended for anyone who's enjoyed Coupland's work in the past.