It's A Wonderful Life (Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland)

Member Name: ruth_cole

Product:	Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland
Date:	05/11/05 (1118 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: lyrical, intelligent, involving

Disadvantages: a little heavy-handed.

Girlfriend In A Coma has almost exactly the same character as its protagonists - human, blowing hot and cold, involving but somehow not that likable.

That's not to say it's not a rather good book. But it's entirely possible to leave it not knowing whether to congratulate or slap the main characters.

The book begins with two tragic incidents. It's 1979. Jared, a 16-year-old sex-mad footballer (in the Canadian sense), recounts dying of leukaemia. Karen loses her virginity on a snow-carpeted mountaintop, and within an hour collapses, falling into an inexplicable coma. The two events are connected only by Richard, Karen's boyfriend and Jared's oldest friend, who takes up the story and navigates the next 20 years.

How the events surrounding Karen's coma (strangely predicted by the girl herself through odd visions of a vaguely apocalyptic future) and Jared's death come together again is the great question - to answer it would be a terrible review.

Douglas Coupland's tripartite novel seems incredibly long for such a short book. Contradiction in terms perhaps, but each of the three sections seems to draw you to the edge of your seat, gasping for the next. Coupland heavily foreshadows the events of the next part without ever giving up the gold at the end of the rainbow.

It's possibly because of this that the characters undergo such revolutions. Since Richard is the character we grow up with, from seventeen to thirty five, from an adolescence pierced almost fatally by his girlfriend's extraordinary half-life to an adulthood full of evading responsibility for his existence in the real world. He's a peculiar character; no-one who so utterly relinquishes responsibility for his own reality can possibly be fully three-dimensional. But there's a sweetness at his core, a congenital feeling of guilt that makes him a person who at least recognises his own evasion of humanity. A step in the right direction, at least. He's a shuffling perennial addict (love, alcohol, wonderment - all possible addictions), and so falls in neatly with his polar opposite, the hard drug-addled Hamilton. Confusing honesty and rudeness (a common enough confusion in a particular kind of person), Hamilton is as abrasive, loud and raucous as Richard is gentle and irritatingly passive. And their girlfriends seem similarly well-matched. Karen is a passive participant in a future she seems powerless to resist, and Pamela, another friend in the group, is a wannabe model, in desperate need of the sparkle and scent of the new to keep her going. Completing the motley crew are the nerds, doctor Wendy (who, St. Elmo's Fire-like, has a lively, sexual streak well-buried) and Linus (real-name Albert), a comic book geek if ever there was one.

Coupland's characters are not without their stereotypes. But that is the essence of what he's trying to say about individuality. All these characters are trying to find "themselves" and in the process of introspective navel-gazing are missing the big picture about humans as a social animal. In fact they're becoming less and less human. Almost all try to escape, but all return, finally ending up working and living practically in each other's pockets. Their solipsistic, introverted existences continue to wrap around each other, and with every development and revelation, you find yourself changing your mind about who is likable and who isn't. Apart from perhaps Hamilton, where I felt an enduring lack of empathy or sympathy from start to finish, I found myself by turns loving and hating each and every one of them. A true human portrayal, then.

Coupland's writing is also very lyrical and beautiful. A snippet indicates this clearly:

"Once at the top, the city lies before them, a glinting damaged sheet of pewter, with fires burning like acetylene pearls fallen from a broken choker. Ropes of smoke rise from the ground as if tethered to the damage; in the harbor, oily gorp has spilled into the waves and burns a Bahamian turquoise blue."

He's obviously a great lover of language, but not in any awed or pretentious sense. He uses plenty of off-hand, natural slang (much of it British-sounding, being a Canadian author), both in his own language and that of each character. There are plenty of the cultural references it seems Coupland is famous for, with a smattering of decent musical ones from The Cure to, obviously, The Smiths.

So why not likable? Well, without trying to give too much away, it's an ambitious novel with a tone of moralising. It's not moralising I disagree with, it's just that, by its very nature, the denouement comes with a generous overdose of drama. Part Three is almost overwhelmingly different from Part One - what you first see isn't what you eventually get. It's an extraordinary blending of styles and genres, and for that reason there's a sense in which too much may be going on in 280 pages. The slow build-up to getting to the heart of this novel leads to an occasionally heavy-handed conclusion. The fact that this conclusion contains a mixture of adolescents and adults acting like adolescents doesn't make it any easier to stomach. On the other hand, it's all played so subtly, teasing and drawing you in, that it couldn't be any more mysterious, or any longer, without driving you mad.

So, yes, this is in many ways quite an amazing book. But it also can get on the nerves. Hence a four-star rating, but a definite recommendation. And given that this has been my first foray into Coupland, it's definitely not put me off exploring further, whatever its slight shortcomings. It is probably inevitable that such an ambitious novel would have its flaws, and it's still very much worth reading at least once.

And no, I'm not explaining that title. :)

ISBN 0-00-655127-0
UK RRP £6.99
First published in 1998 by Flamingo (HarperCollins)

Summary: an intelligent exploration of consciousness wrrapped up in a streetwise, nostalgic novel