Girlfriend in a Coma - Hardcover

Coupland, Douglas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060391782 ISBN 13: 9780060391782

Publisher: William Morrow, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Reviews

"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."

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.

"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

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060391782
• ISBN 13: 9780060391782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288