The First Voice of Generation X Speaks Again

Imagine if Ted Kaczynski were younger, hipper and had a brilliantly witty sense of humor. Imagine that instead of writing a lengthy manifesto on the ills of modern society, he chose instead to compress his belief system into simple, easy-to-swallow sound bites for mass consumption: "The future is fake" "Everybody's lying." "Stop breathing." "Progress is over." Rather than spreading his doctrine with letter bombs and threats of destruction, he might instead have devised a quirky, culture-savvy, pink-jacketed novel about the end of the world. He might very well have penned something like Douglas Coupland's latest novel, Girlfriend in a Coma.

Coupland, author of bestsellers Microserfs and Generation X, both acclaimed for their caustic portraits of jaded twentysomethings, presents another foray into the minds of the hollow, the directionless, the lonely and the poorly-adjusted of the MTV generation. Through their offbeat, media-savvy voices, he opens up a philosophical debate on meaning (or lack thereof) in the modern world, on the detrimental effects of technology on society and the environment, and on the need to challenge the established system.

As the narrative of Girlfriend begins, the ghost of high school football star and self-acknowledged male slut Jared Hansen describes the day that he collapsed during the middle of a football game and then succumbed to a fatal struggle with leukemia. He then hands the narrative reins over to his living friend Richard Doorland, who introduces Coupland's latest array of anti-heroes: a tight circle of high school seniors of the late 1970's residing in leafy Vancouver, British Columbia, (which also happens to be Coupland's place of residence). The cast of characters is eerily reminiscent of a TV sitcom and conveniently created so as to pair-off nicely in the later chapters: meet, for example, pyromaniac slacker Hamilton and his Cover-Girl-to-be sweetheart Pam, "braniac" yearbook editor Wendy and quintessential geek Linus. Coupland gives quick, flashcard snapshots of their individual personalities by showing us their yearbook entries, for example:

Richard Doorland

Suntanning up at Cypress/ "I hate to be the bad guy, but..."/ senior football/ bondo patches on the Datsun/ stereo man/ free Steve Miller tickets/ nice teeth, fella!

Richard goes on to describe how his girl-friend Karen lapsed into a coma in the middle of senior year, after experiencing eerie premonitions of the future and then ODing on alcohol and diet pills, only one day after the pair "deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope." Nine months later, their child Megan is born, but Karen remains comatose for the next seventeen years.

And then she wakes up.

Her awakening throws jolts her friends out of the isolated, automated, unfulfilling lives they have defaulted into. Then, one December evening just before the turn of the century, Karen's dark premonitions of millennial apocalypse vividly come true in Coupland's hypercolor prose. The six friends become the only survivors in a landscape where "endless cars and trucks and minivans sit on road shoulders harboring cargoes of rotted skeletons." In the future, all humanity has collapsed in sleepy death, money has become worthless, and the endless days are tracked only by the clock on Wendy's PowerBook. "Tennis rackets silently unstring inside dark dry closets."

Coupland has mastered the art of the precisely timed witticism, the understatement and the random comic comparison. His language dances around its subjects, as when Richard discovers that the end of the world has come and "an adrenaline fang bites the rear of his neck." Coupland extends his metaphor of human infringement on nature with the words he uses to describe the post-apocalyptic world: "The darkening sky is becoming a warm, dead Xerox and the winds blow forcefully as though aimed from a hair blower," and "Below them, the fire on the sloping neighborhoods burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert." Yet often his quirky comparisons go one step too far and cross over the line between the clever and the ridiculous. After Karen falls into a coma, Richard reminisces about how the remains of high school "flowed by like a wide, slow, pulsing river of cool chocolate milk." All this absurdity is tolerable, even amusing, so long as it doesn't also strive to be deep.

But, tragically, Coupland crosses that line as well. His prose in this novel is infinitely better than his point, which as the novel progresses comes across more and more as a cartoonish attempt at profundity. While he does touch on themes that ring painfully true regarding modern views on death, technology, loneliness and lack of purpose, too often he mixes them with banal platitudes or smart-ass witticisms that reduce his ideas to the absurd.

Initially, his characters' worries carry a touching level of insight into the sources of modern emotional malaise. Karen, awaking from eighteen years of slumber, describes how suddenly "nobody seems to be able to endure being by themselves...but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only to go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other." Yet as the story plows on, the barrage of philosophical ramblings begin to take on a preachy tone which descends into irritating evangelism. In the end, ghost-jock Jared returns to heal his lost friends one by one, bringing them hope for the future and divulging the meaning of life. It's difficult not to stop and wonder just why exactly a dead, nymphomaniac football jock is floating through walls, healing the wounded, impregnating women and then unloading on us the meaning of existence?--surely you are joking, Mr. Coupland.

But by all appearances, he is not. And that is the real tragedy in Girlfriend in a Coma. Coupland's writing style is fresh and funny, but he is clearly at his best when he's playing the witty cynic, not the platitude-dribbling prophet. Advice for the future: leave the crusading to the Unabomber.