Coupland Reawakens To Life With New Novel
He was the hottest (and the coolest) writer for an entire generation, a guy in the national and international headlines from the unlikely place of Vancouver, British Columbia.
With such fast-selling novels as “Generation X” and “Microserfs,” with frequent articles in such prominent publications as “Wired,” Douglas Coupland was riding high on a new wave of knowing irony and insider insight.
Then, Coupland crashed and incinerated, suffering a year of profound depression (1996) when he could not write, when he could not at times even summon the strength to leave his house.
What had always seemed a kind of trendy “made-up thing” to him - a debilitating condition called agoraphobia that turns people into prisoners in their own abodes - had come to visit the former art student and sculptor with a vengeance.
“It wasn’t just that I couldn’t leave my house,” Coupland recalled Tuesday in Seattle. “I couldn’t leave my living room.”
When he finally did return to the computer keyboard, Coupland decided, for his own comfort and security, that he would write about things he knew well in his immediate vicinity, his own circle of friends, his own neighborhood.
The result is the surprising “Girlfriend in a Coma” (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, 284 pages, $24), an ambitious and powerful work that addresses, despite its close-in focus, big themes and important questions.
It is a novel that cries out, in many ways, to be described as “mature,” although that assessment (clearly from an older person’s perspective) would surely make Coupland and his contemporaries cringe. At the least, it can be said that “Girlfriend in a Coma” makes the mannered cuteness and light wry character of Coupland’s “Generation X” seem eons away.
But then, Coupland is 36 now, with a beard that shows flecks of gray, and he even owns a home. Or as the writer himself put it, with a slight smile, “It must be my thirty-something gene kicking in.”
The high school friends in “Girlfriend in a Coma” find themselves in a similar fix, all except for their two cohorts whose tragedies have marked their lives at the hardest possible time.
There is the dead Jared, the football star who succumbed to leukemia at the height of his testosterone charisma, and there is the not-really-alive-but-not-dead Karen, who fell into a coma after having visions as a senior and has stayed in that suspended state for thousands of days.
The remaining friends drift through life, from job to job, from relationship to relationship, as if they could be forever young and restless. But the continual drift has finally grown every bit as tiresome to them as baby boomer navel-gazing.
This is, of course, the inevitable ennui of impending middle age. Or as Coupland describes the mental state: “We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it. We had quietly settled into a premature autumn of life - no gentle mellowing or Indian summer of immense beauty, just a sudden frost, a harsh winter with snows that accumulate, never to melt.”
Then, after 6,719 days of coma-doze, Karen suddenly awakes, a frozen-in-time traveler deposited in a world without the Berlin Wall and with “fat-free everything.” And Jared soon appears on the scene, a ghost with powers and knowledge from somewhere beyond. These two unexpected developments make their friends feel as if they had somehow been “chosen,” especially when the world begins to collapse in chaos.
Existential modern questions become an imperative: “What’s the point of being efficient if you’re only leading an efficiently blank life?” Coupland, at novel’s close, offers his own answers on such matters, answers sometimes so seemingly obvious that he appears to be tightrope-walking on the precipice of platitudes, but still heartfelt.
This sermonizing seems particularly unexpected from a writer who has long cultivated a stance of not being a spokesman for anything. It was not that long ago that Coupland told an interviewer, “Writing that sets out to prove something isn’t really writing; it’s a kind of lobbying.”
The Coupland of today seemed genuinely taken aback that the Coupland of yesterday could have said such a thing, especially in light of the messages of personal connection and positive action that end “Girlfriend in a Coma” with such an exclamation point. But then, this is the very first of Coupland’s six novels where some of the characters actually have children of their own, that transformative event of adulthood where what happens to the world in the future does indeed matter, however cool and uninvolved one presumes to be.
“I think maybe that’s something you learn about responsibilities - how they put you more in tune with the necessity of the moral side of life,” Coupland said. “Everyone may take different pathways to get there, but we all end up in the same place.”
Coupland is philosophical about fame and popularity, resigned to the way they seem to rise and fall with the phases of the moon, although a disastrous tour through Europe on behalf of one of his books was largely what sent him on the downward spiral to 1996 and what he describes as “probably the darkest period of my life.” His first and foremost concern continues to remain his writing - “that’s what I do.”
And so when “Girlfriend in a Coma” tumbled out of his head in a way that none of his novels had before, Coupland followed that raging creative impulse right to its bright, shining conclusion. It was, he knew, “not a focus group ending,” some way to win favor according to the prevailing winds of opinion.
“The book,” he emphasized, “ended up being a parable on the pitfalls of complacency and the unwitting complicity of apathy. It’s about how that really doesn’t work anymore, and how that also spells the end of irony. Irony will only take you to a certain level, and it will never transcend that. …
“My hope is that people will come out of this book just looking at the world with slightly opened eyes,” Coupland said. “That’s all I’m after.”