Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland

On a snowy Saturday night in 1979, after making love for the first time, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil confides the dark visions she's been suffering to her boyfriend, Richard. Only a few hours later she descends into a coma. Nine months after that, she gives birth to a daughter, Megan, her child by Richard. Karen remains comatose for the next 18 years. Richard and her circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory throughout the next two decades, passing through careers as models, film special-effects technicians, doctors and demolition experts before finally being reunited while working on a conspiracy-driven supernatural series. Upon Karen's reawakening, life grows as surreal as the television show. Strange, apocalyptic events begin to occur. Later, amid the world's rubble, Karen, Richard and their friends attempt to restore their own humanity. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review In this latest novel from the poet laureate of Gen X--who is himself now a dangerously mature 36--boy does indeed meet girl. The year is 1979, and the lovers get right down to business in a very Couplandian bit of plein air intercourse: Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath penlight stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon--lung-burning; mentholated and pure; hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo. Are we in for an archetypal '80s romance, played out against a pop-cultural backdrop? Nope. Only hours after losing her virginity, Karen loses consciousness as well--for almost two decades. The narrator and his circle soldier on, making the slow progression from debauched Vancouver youths to semiresponsible adults. Several end up working on a television series that bears a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files (surely a self-referential wink on the author's part). And then ... Karen wakes up. Her astonishment--which suggests a 20th-century, substance-abusing Rip Van Winkle--dominates the second half of the novel, and gives Coupland free reign to muse about time, identity, and the meaning (if any) of the impending millennium. Alas, he also slaps a concluding apocalypse onto the novel. As sleeping sickness overwhelms the populace, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a universal yawn--which doesn't, fortunately, outweigh the sweetness, oddity, and ironic smarts of everything that has preceded it. From Library Journal A high school senior makes love on a ski slope, then mixes drinks and drugs at a wild party and falls into a 17-year coma. She wakes up to find she has a daughter, delivered nine months into her coma. Her friends all seem diminished by the passage of time. Her boyfriend laments, What evidence have we ever given of inner lives? Not long after, a plague kills off everyone on Earth but her friends. Even more bizarre happenings follow, leading to an unconvincing denouement. For the most part, however, Coupland (Generation X, LJ 10/1/91) has crafted a moving chronicle of the impoverished inner lives of a circle of materially rich young adults of the Nineties. Using punchy sentences filled with hip names and brand labels, he succeeds in capturing the weak sense of identity exhibited by a generation that has defined itself in terms of what it consumes and not what it could achieve.?David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist I'm Jared, a ghost. Thus begins Coupland's latest, a novel that starts out ever so promisingly, only to shift gears and run out of gas two-thirds of the way through. The opening line introduces a supernatural element, as Jared, former high-school football star of the Sentinel Spartans in Vancouver, recalls collapsing during a game and dying six weeks later of leukemia. Now he is haunting a postapocalyptic wasteland. How did the world end? His best friend, Richard, continues the narration, recounting the story of six close friends reeling from the loss of their friend Jared only to then lose Karen, Richard's girlfriend, who goes into a coma in December 1979 after ingesting a couple of Valiums and a vodka-and-Tab cocktail, leaving her friends adrift for 20 years in the moral quagmire of the 1980s and 1990s. When she awakes, a veritable Rip Van Winkle, she has a unique perspective and can, therefore, be Coupland's mouthpiece for commenting on the state of things and the hollowness at the core of her friends' and everyone else's lives. Coupland excels at developing vivid and real characters, but he is best when he sticks to the milieu he knows so well, that of edgy post^-baby boomers. Part Stephen King (The Stand [1990], Dead Zone [1979]), part It's a Wonderful Life, with a little of his own Generation X (1991) thrown in, Coupland's immensely readable new novel shows him scared of the future and sounding the alarm for the millennium. Benjamin Segedin From Kirkus Reviews The writer who gave a generation its well-deserved ``X'' returns to the quasi-theological themes of his third novel, Life After God (1994), and again wanders off into spacey, New Age platitudes about death and transcendence. Although God makes no personal appearances here, He's represented by the ghost of an 18-year-old football player whose life touched all the aimless souls wandering through this media- literate narrative. After a gimmicky prologue in the voice of the dead Jared, Coupland soon shifts gears, displaying a new-found maturity and sharpness. Spanning two decades in the close-knit lives of friends in Vancouver, his kinetic text begins with the episode that lands the narrator's girlfriend in her 18-year coma. But whether it was the mix of pills and booze or Karen's premonition of a dreary future that rendered her comatose, the tragedy reverberates among her pals, whose lives will spiral out of control over the next two decades. Her boyfriend, Richard, the narrator, remains a faithful visitor to her bedside, through his go-go years as a stockbroker and his bouts of alcoholism. Of course, he must deal with their growing daughter, conceived the night before Karen's coma and unaware of her mother for seven years. And Karen's friends, to a person, all feel like losers, despite successful careers as a supermodel (Pam) and a doctor (Wendy). Drugs, overwork, and sheer boredom trouble even the seemingly-centered Linus, who eventually returns to Vancouver with all the rest. With everyone sleepwalking through life, Karen miraculously awakes, but her worst visions come true--and here the story veers into disaster-movieland, with a sleep-inducing plague overwhelming the planet. Jared returns to teach them about self-sacrifice and the need to change their lives, relying on all sorts of utopian blather and spiritual nostrums. Sappy at its core, but showing signs nonetheless of Coupland's evolution as a novelist not wholly dependent on trend- spotting and zeitgeisty patter. (Author tour) -- Copyright ®1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review ... Coupland's dialogue is flip and fresh. (New York magazine) ...a message of hope and a challenge to...cynicism. (USA Today) His strongest novel to date. (People) Part Stephen King, part It's a Wonderful Life, with a little of his own Generation X thrown in, Coupland's immensely readable . . . novel shows him scared of the future and sounding the alarm for the millennium. (Booklist) To call Coupland the John Bunyon of his set would not be hyperbole, especially in light of his newest book, the...fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma, which at times approaches a jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut...[A] rousingly old-fashioned and genuinely spooky morality play. (The Washington Post) About the Author Douglas Coupland is the author of twelve novels, including Generation X and Microserfs, and several works of nonfiction, including Polaroids from the Dead. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. From The Washington Post To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole, especially in light of his newest book, the monitory and fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma, which at times approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut. From The Washington Post To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole, especially in light of his newest book, the monitory and fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma, which at times approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut.