Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
On a snowy Friday night in 1979, just hours after making love for the first time, Richard's girlfriend, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to their daughter, Megan. As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, Richard and their circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory, passing through a variety of careers—modeling, film special effects, medicine, demolition—before finally reuniting on a conspiracy-driven super-natural television series. But real life grows as surreal as their TV show as Richard and his friends await Karen's reawakening . . . and the subsequent apocalypse.
Synopsis
On a snowy Friday night in 1979, just hours after making love for the first time, Richard's girlfriend, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to their daughter, Megan. As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, Richard and their circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory, passing through a variety of careers—modeling, film special effects, medicine, demolition—before finally reuniting on a conspiracy-driven super-natural television series. But real life grows as surreal as their TV show as Richard and his friends await Karen's reawakening . . . and the subsequent apocalypse.
Andrew Leonard
Maybe it's unfair to condemn Douglas Coupland for populating his novels with characters whose lives are flat and pallid. Ever since his first, now classic, pop novel, Generation X, Coupland's worldview has been predicated on the notion that contemporary existence -- suburbia, in particular -- has emotionally and spiritually crippled an entire demographic swathe. So if the characters in Girlfriend in a Coma strike the reader as remarkably unengaging, that's OK, because that's how they are supposed to be.
But that thesis doesn't hold up. Girlfriend in a Coma is another glum Coupland novel that never musters the strength to get satisfyingly morose. Even the word "bleak" is too strong a word to describe the Coupland mind-set. His characters complain about a "future" where everyone works too hard and has forgotten how to be goofy, where people have "devolved" and lost the ability to discover any meaning in life. Once again, Coupland proves that, while the slackers whose mentality he nailed to the wall in Generation X have grown up and gotten on with their lives, Coupland hasn't.
In more imaginative hands, Coupland's main gimmick might offer some promise. Karen McNeil, a 17-year-old girl, goes into a coma in 1979 and wakes up in 1997 -- mental faculties intact. The juxtaposition of fin-de-siècle Vancouver with the increasingly mythic era of the late '70s could have been fun, or at the very least insightful. Instead, it becomes just another vehicle for Coupland to declaim about what a drag the future has turned out to be. We get a few jokes about how great the pasta is in the 1990s -- not to mention the availability of blue nail polish and new hygiene products -- but mostly, the future is a place where "there's a hardness in modern people" and everyone takes great pride in how "efficient" they've become.
But there is no real clash of sensibilities, no real exploration of what has or hasn't changed in the last 20 years. Ultimately, this Rip Van Winkle gambit is just a gimmick, nothing more than a lazy narrative trick. Karen's high school friends, who have variously managed to become heroin addicts, recovering alcoholics and production assistants on a thinly disguised X-Files TV show without changing in any perceivable way from their teenage selves, adopt Karen back into their midst, and continue their incessant whining.
And then the walls cave in. In the last third of the novel Coupland delivers a plot twist so ludicrous in conception and so incompetently executed that it beggars description. Luckily, to outline it in detail would be akin to giving away a key plot point, so I won't do it. Suffice to say, only Coupland could take "the end of the world as we know it" and make it irrelevant and boring. -- Salon
Editorials
USA Today
"...a message of hope and a challenge to...cynicism."Booklist
"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."The Washington Post
"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."New York magazine
“... Coupland’s dialogue is flip and fresh.”People
“His strongest novel to date.”New York Magazine
"... Coupland’s dialogue is flip and fresh."People Magazine
"His strongest novel to date."Andrew Leonard
Maybe it's unfair to condemn Douglas Coupland for populating his novels with characters whose lives are flat and pallid. Ever since his first, now classic, pop novel, Generation X, Coupland's worldview has been predicated on the notion that contemporary existence -- suburbia, in particular -- has emotionally and spiritually crippled an entire demographic swathe. So if the characters in Girlfriend in a Coma strike the reader as remarkably unengaging, that's OK, because that's how they are supposed to be.
But that thesis doesn't hold up. Girlfriend in a Coma is another glum Coupland novel that never musters the strength to get satisfyingly morose. Even the word "bleak" is too strong a word to describe the Coupland mind-set. His characters complain about a "future" where everyone works too hard and has forgotten how to be goofy, where people have "devolved" and lost the ability to discover any meaning in life. Once again, Coupland proves that, while the slackers whose mentality he nailed to the wall in Generation X have grown up and gotten on with their lives, Coupland hasn't.
In more imaginative hands, Coupland's main gimmick might offer some promise. Karen McNeil, a 17-year-old girl, goes into a coma in 1979 and wakes up in 1997 -- mental faculties intact. The juxtaposition of fin-de-siècle Vancouver with the increasingly mythic era of the late '70s could have been fun, or at the very least insightful. Instead, it becomes just another vehicle for Coupland to declaim about what a drag the future has turned out to be. We get a few jokes about how great the pasta is in the 1990s -- not to mention the availability of blue nail polish and new hygiene products -- but mostly, the future is a place where "there's a hardness in modern people" and everyone takes great pride in how "efficient" they've become.
But there is no real clash of sensibilities, no real exploration of what has or hasn't changed in the last 20 years. Ultimately, this Rip Van Winkle gambit is just a gimmick, nothing more than a lazy narrative trick. Karen's high school friends, who have variously managed to become heroin addicts, recovering alcoholics and production assistants on a thinly disguised X-Files TV show without changing in any perceivable way from their teenage selves, adopt Karen back into their midst, and continue their incessant whining.
And then the walls cave in. In the last third of the novel Coupland delivers a plot twist so ludicrous in conception and so incompetently executed that it beggars description. Luckily, to outline it in detail would be akin to giving away a key plot point, so I won't do it. Suffice to say, only Coupland could take "the end of the world as we know it" and make it irrelevant and boring. -- Salon