Girlfriend in a Coma

Despite having neglected my copy of this novel for years, I really love Douglas Coupland. He has a wry humour and cutting observational style that I can appreciate, even though I was born about ten years too late and in the wrong country to understand a lot of his generational commentary. That said, the self-obsessed 1990s angsting and existential blather dragged the story down for me. Karen's astute criticism of modern life, upon waking up from a seventeen year coma, is spot on - 'There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now' - but Coupland takes that theme a tad too far, via Stephen King-esque apocalypse and guardian angels who show more can work miracles. The extraordinary circumstances of Karen's recovery were pushed over into heavy-handed symbolism, and my suspension of disbelief started to groan with the strain, I must admit. Still, a cracking read, managing to evince both the 1970s (I'm guessing) and the 1990s (via the X-Files, which is the first thing I associate with BC and Vancouver!) show less

Sublime and eery apocalyptic tale of gen X'ers... Karen falls into a coma at age 17 in 1979. She wakes 17 years later to find her thirty something friends living hollow, yet efficient lives. She predicts the end of the world which comes, leaving she and her friends as the only remaining humans. A ghost of a high school friend leads them to the truth and sends them back into the world to bear witness.
Coupland states that there is one absolute truth, but he never reveals what that truth is. The book is disjointed as it is divided into two parts and seemingly two novels, loosely tied together. This was my first Coupland read and I def. want to read more.

It's the late 1970s, and at a party, teenage Richard's girlfriend Karen (who is dieting for her upcoming Hawaiian vacation) takes a couple of valiums along with a weak cocktail. She slips into a persistent vegetative state (Karen Ann Quinlan, anyone? Even down to the name Karen). Richard and their group of friends, who were already scarred by the death of their friend Jared the year before, muddle into adulthood. One has a brilliant but short career as a supermodel, one becomes a physician, and several of them end up working in the film industry. Despite successes in life, they are really a bunch of losers lost in a fog of ennui. Until 17 years later, when Karen awakens from her coma. This is about half way into the novel, and suddenly show more there is a major change of direction as an apocalyptic illness breaks out and kills everyone on earth except this group. (This is not a spoiler as it is mentioned on the back cover blurb). The initial story of the apocalypse was very entertaining, but then the book sort of wanders off toward its end, with philosophical musings about the meaning and purpose of life. Oh, and the ghost of Jared returns to guide them.

I really liked the first part, and then when it switched to a sci-fi novel I switched mindsets and liked that too. But then it just kinda . . . got weird and not very interesting. Not Coupland's best (I've seen him interviewed and he said he was in a really bad place when he wrote this one). Still, I'd rather read a "meh" Coupland than a lot of other stuff out there.

As always though, Coupland is sharp with capturing cultural snap shots. He has an amazing ability to capture time and place (the 1970s teenage party spot on perfect--down to the Bob Seger music). This is one of his novels set in Vancouver, and he can write about the city with an accuracy that I haven't come across elsewhere.

Recommended for: people who like books set in Vancouver, or books about the apocalypse. There are readers who just love this book, and probably just as many who hate it. If you haven't read Coupland before, don't start with this one. show less

A 20 year look at the course of events surrounding the friends of the titular character starting from the night before the tragic event to 20 years after when she wakes up. You know you're in for a strange ride right from the off with the first of the narrators being the ghost of a character that died a year before. It's a post-apocalyptic dystopian story set in a Canadian mountain town that rushes through the intervening years between the going into and coming out of the coma to concentrate on events before and after and takes a look at how people and society have changed during that time. An interesting book but not a great one.

The first half of this book was a really interesting and well-written novella about loss, grief, and loneliness and the rippling impact of tragedy. I was even willing to suspend disbelief to allow the title character to (against all odds) wake from her coma after seventeen years. But then the book just went off the rails. The "apocolypse" was overly preachy, simplistic, and just silly. I can hardly express how disappointed I was with the final 100 pages or so. Without giving away too much plot, I'll say that the very end was rather touching, but didn't come close to making up for the utterly ridiculous sci-fi turn that the book took.

This is a book that left me uncertain what I even think about it, which I think is a good thing. Yes, it's a novel in two parts--the first a sort of tragic teenage love story and the disintegration of a man who lives his life pretty much parallel to that of his girlfriend in a coma, while their daughter spirals into chaos. Then the girlfriend wakes up, and it becomes an apocalypse novel, narrated by the ghost of their high school friend and involving a lot of semi-preachy and sentimental moments about how humans in modern society have gone wrong, and how they might atone for it. Of course it wasn't believable, but nor was it meant to be. It has this sort of guerrilla-hope thing going on at the end that was interesting but not really show more aligned with the characters and the opening. I liked a lot about this book and suspect I'll keep thinking about it for some time. show less

I found the teenage Karen's premonitions and her view of the late 1990s world that she woke up to, thought provoking. She feels that her friends have stagnated while she was in a coma and have lost something of themselves over the years, and they don't seem as adult as she would have expected.

It was an enjoyable book, but frankly I found the 'post-end of the world' section a bit of a let-down, even though I'm not averse to a bit of fantasy.

Jared's comment about the group wasting their time was obviously true, as they had spent a year in watching videos and playing computer games, but in my opinion they should have been planting crops and learning to be self-sufficient, not obsessing about the past.

However, as I went to Western Canada show more on holiday last year, I did like the Vancouver setting. show less