Six sentences into the first chapter of Timequake, his latest book, Kurt Vonnegut writes, "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled it off. I reply, `The Beatles did.' "
While there are some shared aesthetics between Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma and a rock concept album, we're nowhere near Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Coupland has taken his title and other inspirations from The Smiths, a Manchester band that purveyed gloomily erotic and melancholic bedsit Brit existentialism during the mid-'80s. The Smiths weren't a band I listened to with much attention, but I do remember that Morrissey, the lead singer, confessed that he'd failed in his great ambition to write scripts for Coronation Street. The angst of Coupland's sixth fiction comes right out of a daytime soap opera, WestEnders or The Young & the Indolent.
Girlfriend in a Coma opens in Vancouver in 1979, with Jared, the ghost of a high school quarterback who died in January of that year, delivering a monologue about the end of the world as he sees it. This is daytime television that dares to soar to the depths of late night replays of Hollywood movies of the ghost-with-the-helping-hand genre. Jared gives way to Richard, who tells us about losing his virginity on December 15th, 1979 on Grouse Mountain with his girlfriend Karen on a "night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon-lung-burning; mentholated and pure; a hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo." Ah, the graphic memories of first sex-that hint of ozone, the indelible odour of shampoo. But, hey, Richard has every right to remember all the details-even zinc, ski wax, air of the Moon-with daffy romanticism, because after the sex there's an accident.
While Richard is off in search of his buddies Hamilton and Linus amidst the wreckage of a full-throttle throw-the-bottles-and-the-television-set-into-the-swimming-pool suburban hell-raising party, Karen gets together with her friends Pam and Wendy for girl talk and drinks. Karen, who is on a crash diet, takes a combination of vodka and pills that puts her in a coma. But after having had sex for the first time in that air of the Moon on Grouse Mountain she's pregnant and gives birth to a daughter nine months later while still asleep.
Girlfriend in a Coma is nearly winsome and at its best during the eighteen years that Karen remains in her coma. Richard and the others become Generation Xers. Coupland once again nails the era he named: he's master of the insignificant details that best capture the look and feel of lives snapped on Polaroid. And because he's so good at framing things with just a hint of sentimentality here and an edge of danger there, I read quite happily along as lives unfolded as they shouldn't. Hamilton becomes an engineer and blows things up in unexpected ways. Linus wanders through various North American deserts until he has a vision in Las Vegas and returns to Vancouver. Pam becomes a glam fashion model in Paris and gets wrecked by drugs. Wendy becomes a doctor who is her own worst patient.
Richard's life never really gets started. While Karen sleeps, he boozily sleepwalks through jobs in real estate and stock brokerage and is a father of sorts to Karen's daughter Megan, who is growing up in the home of her grandparents.
Richard is pulled out of his downward spiral into alcoholism by the return of Pam, Ham, and Linus to Vancouver. All four start working together as special effects technicians on a television series that's a dead ringer for The X Files. That's a lovely joke, pregnant with irony, ambivalence, and satirical possibilities. Or is it? Douglas Coupland is in the process of re-inventing himself as a writer with this book and his intentions aren't altogether transparent in the first half. Me being me, I figured that he'd picked up a clue or two from Russell Smith's How Insensitive, started reading Kingsley Amis, and found his own way to the books of the middle period when Amis employed ghosts and time travel to deflate the self-regard of semi-detached suburban lives.
No such luck. As soon as the story starts to turn on Richard's recovery, it becomes clearer that Coupland being Coupland, he's just found his way into that peculiar zone of the Zeitgeist that's preoccupied with the very things that Harold Bloom deflates with such precise deadpan needling in Omens of the Millennium: near-death experiences, prophetic dreams, and angels who are ghosts with wings and act a lot like the occupant of Aladdin's lamp.
In the second half of the book, Coupland is so grimly determined to make himself over into a New Age writer of purpose-the shamanistic conscience of a generation on the cusp of coming to power with the new millennium-that his old ironies are all inflated with the sour yeast of moral uplift. It's unclear if he any longer gets his own best jokes. When Karen wakes up on Halloween 1997, all the characters converge on the hospital in a scene most satirists would kill to conjure up. Coupland plays it straight.
Karen discovers she has a daughter the same mental age as herself-a nice touch that sets up a straight-arrow commentary on the ways in which the world of eighteen-year-olds has shifted between 1979 and 1997. There are half a dozen pages of cultural history that is as accurate and efficient as the opening pages of Generation X. But once Karen starts having visions of the future and that future comes to pass with a great crashing of the world in a timequake that's of less metaphysical interest than Vonnegut's, the tension between past and present goes out of the book. Coupland's writing gets even slacker, as limp, lifeless, simply declarative, and crudely grooved as pulp science fiction. And as predictable. It's just one damned thing after another getting trashed until Jared comes down from heaven. When Megan asks Jared what heaven is like, he says, "Heaven? Heaven is like the world at its finest. It's all natural-no buildings." No kidding. Then Jared turns into a twinkly New Age genie with a penchant for ectoplasmic sex and works hoodoo on Megan and on some of the others. Wishes are granted. Eyes are opened.
Richard captures the essence of the good news according to Jared in the epiphany that ends the book: "You'll soon be seeing us walking down your street, our backs held proud, our eyes dilated with truth and power. We might look like you, but you should know better. We'll draw our line in the sand and force the world to cross our line. Every cell in our body explodes with the truth. We will be kneeling in front of the Safeway, atop out-of-date textbooks whose pages we have chewed out.. We'll crawl and chew and dig our way into a radical new world. We will change minds and souls from stone and plastic into linen and gold-that's what I believe. That's what I know."
Sorry, but that knowledge isn't enough to get the job done. Changing minds requires more delicate conceptual tools than the bag of Hollywooden hammers Douglas Coupland offers. We need far better ways of tracking our traffic with infinity than signs and portents of Rodeo-Drive-drenched end-of-the-millennium religiosity à la Shirley MacLaine and a prospect of an all-natural heaven. The future is only one of our daily considerations and a very mischievous one. What is brilliantly displayed in Vonnegut's Timequake is his ability to focus on the deep embarrassment of being alive in this era, without giving up the joy of simply being alive here and now. That's art. Girlfriend in a Coma is dulled by its insistence that life must be a grudge match between young and old. That's pop sociology. Like Coronation Street in the days when Morrissey couldn't get a job there, Coupland used to do it so much better.
T. F. Rigelhof is a Montreal novelist and critic. His novel Badass on a Softail was reviewed in the April issue.
