Apocalypse now

My first encounter with Douglas Coupland came a few years ago in the form of ‘Generation X’. I wasn’t particularly impressed.

If the task of the novelist is – as is generally assumed to be the case – to chronicle, reflect and refract in fiction the world and times in which he or she lives, then depicting the directionlessness and purposelessness of the lives of well-educated young people in late twentieth century North America is as valid a project as any other. It just doesn’t make for a very gripping read. Before long I found that the only real reason I was persevering with ‘Generation X’ was for the amusing neologisms which appear with definitions at the bottom of nearly every page like footnotes – “McJob”, “Now Denial”, “occupational slumming”.

So I probably wouldn’t have bothered with ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, were it not for Tom Paulin’s confession of having been “absolutely knocked over by it”. For the dour hypercritical Paulin to praise it as “visually brilliant” and “a millennial novel of a very subtle and interesting kind”, I reasoned, it must be something quite special.

Certainly there’s a drive and focus to the narrative that is absent from ‘Generation X’. The protagonists of both novels drift through life aimlessly, “day-to-day twentieth-century living [having] become an almost unsolvable algebraic equation” – but whereas in Coupland’s debut this is mirrored in the structural shapelessness, the definite forward motion of ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ is striking in comparison. There is always an end in sight.

And an end is what ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ is all about. The end of the world as we know it (as REM, not The Smiths, once sang), no less. But an end which isn’t quite the end but the opportunity for a fresh new beginning for the characters who have “been allowed to see what [their] lives would be like in the absence of the world”.

But the novel’s end is also its biggest problem. The major difference between ‘Generation X’ and ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ is that the former is simply descriptive, whereas the latter is both descriptive and prescriptive. That means that, perhaps inevitably, the conclusion – an extraordinarily impassioned rallying cry of “Carpe diem!” from the supposedly non-judgemental chronicler of the slacker generation – slides into heavy-handed preaching, the ghost Jared lecturing the reader as transparently as he is his friends.

This loss of subtlety and authorial restraint is a shame, because otherwise it’s an ambitious and visionary book that I enjoyed much more than its lightweight predecessor.

(A postscript: What’s with all the Smiths references? Aside from ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, I noticed (when I could be bothered to look) ‘Ask’, ‘Hand In Glove’ and – most conspicuously – ‘The Queen Is Dead’. It just seems like Coupland playing pointless games, a gimmick for trainspottery readers, one which detracts needlessly from the novel’s seriousness.)